‘Unintentionally among the queerest releases of its time’: why Calamity Jane is my feelgood movie

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There was a real vogue for gunslinging heroines back in mid-20th century American cinema. Gene Tierney wrangled civil war rebels in Belle Starr. Betty Hutton pranced around with a shotgun in a sparkly red cowgirl get-up, alongside a cowhide-wearing Howard Keel, in Annie Get Your Gun. But cinemagoers were thrown a curveball three years later when they got Doris Day – again with baritone sidekick Keel in tow – dressed, wise-cracking and swaggering exactly like a man.

Admittedly, when I first saw Calamity Jane aged nine, I was also not immediately sold. Not because of Day’s gender non-conformity, which had me hooked, but because of the bizarreness of the pseudo-biopic’s synopsis and its grating musical numbers. The New York Times had a point when they deemed it “shrill and preposterous”. Then there was the fact that on first look it appeared to be a western. Part crooning romcom, part frontier drama, it’s a strange beast of a film, but I was soon won over.

Sometime in the 1870s, Calamity Jane resides in a Dakota saloon town appropriately named Deadwood. We first meet her as the opening credits roll, galloping home, squawking the unlikely refrain “whip crack-away” – the first of many annoying but infectious ditties – before she arrives and melodically introduces Deadwood’s denizens – oddly lacking women – including Wild Bill (Keel). Calamity, who has a hot head and a big mouth, sees the frequenters of her favourite haunt, the Golden Garter, drooling over a “cigar-eet” packet picture of actor Adelaid Adams (Gale Robbins). In an effort to impress her pals, she promises she’ll bring the vaudevillian from “Chicagi” to the backwater town and much chaos ensues.

In many ways, the storyline of this merry caper is unfortunately regressive, because of its sexist attitudes and the horrific colonial violence wrought by the real-life Calamity, Martha Jane Canary. (Thanks to the frontierswoman’s yarn-spinning, this is a rather fanciful, unverifiable biopic.) But for me as a tomboy growing up in the early noughties, Day’s performance was a revelation. I instantly recognised her aversion to girly clothing and her desperation to be one of the boys. Day, who until that point had exclusively played rosy-cheeked romantic leads – the vehicle of many of David Butler’s prior movies – is transformed into a feisty, chin-jutting, strutting alpha.

Calamity is unapologetically ballsy, scrappy and even smelly. She fires her pistol into the heavens anytime she simply wants to make a point. The whipsmart sharpshooter was the only cinematic female hero I had come across who was not Angelina Jolie wearing hot-pants. Unlike most female and non-binary characters then on screens, James O’Hanlon’s script gave Calamity all the best lines: “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us, not for that frilled-up, flirtin’, man-rustlin’ petticoat it ain’t.”

Butler’s campy, rollicking flick was, probably unintentionally, among the queerest Hollywood releases of its time. It starts off with what is essentially a drag show – despite not being to the Deadwood crowd’s tastes. Then, in a hilarious meet-cute, the Adelaid who Calamity fetches from “the windy city” turns out to be the less vocally gifted, but more “purty” Katie Brown (Allyn Ann McLerie). They shack up together in a kitschy, chintzy queer cottage of dreams. Many have taken Jane for a lesbian, but when she and Katie become rivals for the affection of blue-buttoned Lieutenant Danny Gilmartin (Philip Carey), Calamity seems to experience every bisexual’s nightmare: the two people she fancies getting together.

The true appeal of this unashamedly yankee tale is the breezy, trouble-free world this gender-non-conforming character occupies. Calamity’s masc wardrobe turns heads, but she couldn’t care less. Inhabiting this guileless world over the course of an hour and a half is the only remedy for low spirits I could ever need, and sometimes it’s difficult to resist belting out a few of the twee ballads too.

That Out Magazine called the musical’s top-line track Secret Love the first gay anthem is unsurprising. With lyrics like “now, I shout it from the highest hills” and “at last my heart’s an open door”, it would unmistakably seem a coming-out song – it’s just a shame she’s actually crooning about Wild Bill. O’Hanlon’s script may eventually have the prairie protagonist settle and buckle a little under the weight of societal standards, but the fact that the film has been reclaimed and subsumed into queer culture is part of its unalloyed joy. I may have been cursed to forever have Day shrilly intoning “no, siree!” in a loop in my head, but it’s worth the suffering.