Tugboat Annie One More Time.

 

Tugboat Annie Sails Again (1940) is the movie responsible for me going down a Tugboat Annie rabbit hole recently. I recorded the movie off of TCM, but it was a sequel and--according to the strict rules of the International Society for Watching Movies in Proper Order--I needed to watch the first movie first. I didn't want a reprimand on my permanent record.

Anyway, I ended up reading one of the original short stories and wrote about it HERE. I then found out that 1933's Tugboat Annie was available inexpensively via Amazon Prime, so I bought it and watched it. Last Thursday's post contains my review.

NOW I could finally watch Tugboat Annie Sails Again. 

But it's not really a sequel. It's what we would call today a reboot. In the original prose stories, Annie became a tugboat captain after her husband died, taking over her post. She manages the tugboats owned by a company while actually serving as captain aboard one of them.

In the 1933 movie, Annie owns her own tugboat and her husband is alive. Annie is the captain because she's capable and her husband is a drunken layabout. She also has a son.

The 1940 movie jumps back to the continuity of the original short stories. Now played by Marjorie Rambeau, Annie is once again a widow with no kids and she once again works for a corporation. Alan Hale, Sr. plays Horatio Bullwinkle, a rival tugboat captain. And though Annie doesn't have a son, she does have a substitute--a ward named Eddie Kent (played by Ronald Reagan). 

The script is credited as an original story, based on the Tugboat Annie characters, but the film uses  several elements from the first Annie short story, including the danger of her losing her job, a businessman who doesn't trust a woman captain and her knowledge of obscure maritime law saving the day in the end.

Annie, at first, gets the company in trouble. She's trying to negotiate a contract with a businessman named Armstrong, but his slightly spoiled daughter (Jane Wyman) gets on Eddie's nerves. When Armstrong arrives, Eddie is giving his daughter a spanking. Shenanigans ensues and Armstrong ends up covered in garbage. That pretty much guarentees that Annie will not get the contract.

But she redeems herself--and makes her company a nice piece of change--when she employs her considerable skill as a sailor to rescue a cargo ship that's trapped on a sand spit. This gives her a chance to get that contract with Armstrong.

That involves towing a drydock from Washingon state to Alaska, but a liner that ignores the maritime rules of the road rams the drydock, forcing Annie to leave it beached on a nearby island. Her rival Bullwinkle later claims it as salvage. 

Now it looks like Annie is going to be out of a job. But she is both smart and tenacious and still might be able to pull out a win.

Rambeau gives a more overtly emotional performance as Annie than did Marie Dressler, but she's great in the role in her own way. We never doubt for a moment that she is smart, a skilled sailer and earns the loyalty of her crew. In fact, a scene in which her crew offers to quit if she's put on the beach hits just the right emotional notes to seem real rather than corny or contrived.

It can be argued that the eventual romance between Eddie and Miss Armstrong is too predictable and contrived, but Reagan and Wyman work well with each other and make their scenes together work. 

I wish that there had been more scenes of the tugboats at sea doing their work, but that's a nitpick. Tugboat Annie Sails Again is a fun movie and a worthy entry in its version of the Tugboat Annie multiverse.