TIM WONG imparts some straight talk on “Calamity Jane”, screening as part of this year’s Outtakes Film Festival.

HAVING RECENTLY completed a mini-retrospective of Doris Day vehicles – including The Pajama Game, Young Man With a Horn, and two out of three of Day’s couplings with ironic screen stallion Rock Hudson – there’s little doubt that programming hammy musical-western Calamity Jane into Outtakes 2007 is a stroke of camp genius. On a scale of butchness, Day may be entirely unconvincing as the legendary bruiser and brawler of the Old West, but as far as gay subtext goes, this is about as queer as a movie gets without it knowing so. In fact, almost inadvertently within its opening passages – marked by mediocre drag act ‘Frances Fryer’ taking to the stage – the film threatens to become a westernised Peking Opera Blues, complete with gender inversions and musical numbers performed largely by men. The star of that film, the incomparable Brigitte Lin, generated an indelible niche career out of transgendered roles, playing everything from martial arts women disguised as men (Dragon Inn), to invincible eunuchs (Swordsman II), to the male lead in a classic Chinese romantic melodrama (The Dream of the Red Chamber, a lesbian film festival candidate if ever there was one). What Day lacks in Lin’s beguiling androgyny though, she makes up for in sheer spread-legged gusto, turning in an almost vaudeville impression of what she thinks it means to be Jane: the crotch-swinging walk, the frog in the throat… it’s at once embarrassing, valiant, and strangely endearing.

But for all of its sporting confections – including a sustained period where Calam’ and town belle Katie get to bond as bosom buddies and move in together – the film fails to follow through on its gender-bending promise, and it’s hard to imagine queer folk being satisfied at how it eventually pans out. Essentially, Jane undergoes a straight makeover, as Katie teaches her how to wear a skirt, scrub up, and interior decorate. Beneath all that muck and chafing rawhide is golden girl Doris Day; only then does the apple of her eye, Wild Bill Hickok, propose marriage. Both the heroines in Johnny Guitar and Forty Guns get their man without compromising their posture as tough-as-nails broads, and it’s clear that Day’s integrity as “one of the boys” wouldn’t be so in question if she had half the cheekbones of Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Crawford. Calamity Jane isn’t lurid like those films, and ultimately suppresses its sexual ambivalence – something all westerns have the potential to embrace. And yet it’s easy to forget that musicals are inherently camp (especially when cowboys are required to sing – Paint Your Wagon, anyone?), and Calamity Jane is most outwardly so. The festival wants you to download the film’s lyrics from their website, and dress up as Calam’, Hickok, or any one of the Deadwood townsfolk. Casting aside inhibitions to don chaps and a 10-gallon hat may be easier said than done, but if it’s anything like an audience with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it’ll prove too tempting for even the straightest movie fan to pass up.