Tugboat Annie

 

Recently, I recorded the 1940 movie Tugboat Annie Sails Again off of TCM. (And, yes, Angela, I KNOW that half our DVR is filled with movies I've recorded off of TCM. I'll get around to watching them soon. I will. Really.)

Anyway, it sounded like a sequel or part of a series to me, so I looked it up. There are, in fact, three Tugboat Annie movies (made in 1933, 1940 and 1945 respectively). There was later a Canadian-produced TV series made in 1957, several of which are on YouTube. I'll include one of them at the bottom of this post.

The character of Tugboat Annie, though, originated in a series of stories published in the Saturday Evening Post beginning in 1931. A little bit of diving into the Internet Rabbit Hole turned up a long-out-of-print anthology on the Internet Archive. Published in 1977, the book is lacking specific copyright information for each individual story, but I believe the first one, simply titled "Tugboat Annie," is the very first one published.

The author, Norman Reilly Raine, dives right in and gives us a near perfect picture of Annie's formidable personality in just a few pages. Annie is loud, boisterious, unafraid to say what she thinks and--well, she's pretty much a force of nature. To know Annie is to be terrified of her.

Annie runs the small tugboat fleet for the Deep-Sea Towing and Salvage Company. She personally captains the tug "Narcissus." A new partner is buying his way into the company, but he doesn't care for having a woman in charge of anything. He doesn't care for the forward way she conducts herself and even objects to her naming the various tugs after flowers.

We learn that Annie took over as captain from her husband after his death. We're also told he was an alcoholic. As much as we come to quickly like Annie, being married to her could very well have been a factor in his drinking.

Anyway, a ship goes aground and Annie races a few other tugboats there to make offers for towing the damaged vessel to port. The captain of that ship, though, drives a hard bargain. Annie gets the job and the story does a great job of vividly describe the difficult task of towing a large vessel through rough seas on a dark night.

But to get that job, Annie had to make a very low offer and even leave the ship's skipper with a loophole that allows him to pay even less. At first it seems as if Annie has fouled up and that she's bound to lose her job now. But Annie isn't just a great sailor. She's also smart as a whip and she had noticed several things about the salvaged ship that everyone else missed. Things that will allow her to use maritime law to make a boat-load of money on the job.

Needless to say, Annie keeps her job. 

Annie's a great character--there's several subtle hints to a hidden compassionate nature buried below her gruff interior--and I look forward to reading the rest of the anthology. And I'll watch the movie soon. Well, I'm pretty obsessive about watching movies in order, so I'll probably wait until I have a chance to watch the 1933 film first. After all, the DVR is only half-full. One could say it's half-empty and has plenty of room on it for recording more stuff.