Calamity Jane is a 1953 American Technicolor Western musical film starring Doris Day and Howard Keel, and directed by David Butler.

In the American frontier Old West of the Dakota Territory in the Black Hills during the 1870s, tough-talking, hard-riding, straight-shooting Calamity Jane (Doris Day) rides into the gold mining boom-town on top of the Deadwood stagecoach, wielding a rifle, and boasts, not always honestly, of her Indian-fighting exploits at a saloon where she has a "sassparilly".

Though Fryer is initially convincing, his wig accidentally falls off, and the angry audience of rough-and-tough miners / cowboys threatens to tear the saloon down.

Calamity calms the situation, vowing to bring the renowned singer Adelaid Adams of Chicago back to Deadwood to give a concert.

However, her friend "Wild Bill" Hickok (Howard Keel) expresses doubt, scoffing at the idea just as he scoffs at "Calam"'s relatively masculine appearance and frontier dressings / outfits.

After a long stagecoach and train journey, Calamity arrives in Chicago, where Miss Adams is giving her farewell performance before launching an overseas European tour.

After the show ends, Adelaid gives her old costumes to her maid and understudy, Katie Brown (Allyn Ann McLerie), who dreams of becoming a singer herself.

Meanwhile, Wild Bill is in the audience, dressed as a "squaw" with a papoose, having lost a side bet if Calamity couldn't bring Adelaid to Deadwood.

[12] Armond White sees the film as approaching sexuality in a way that Hollywood was not openly able to do, describing the empathy and envy (despite this resulting from conflict over a man) between Jane and Katie's characters as "a landmark display of girl-on-girl attraction.

"[13] When asked about her award winning song being embraced by the gay community during a 2011 interview with The Advocate (magazine), 58 years after the movie's release, star actress Doris Day (1922-2019), in long retirement when told about the unique significance that the film enjoyed in its subsequent decades of showings and popularity, (at her age 89, and eight years before her own passing), replied, "I was not aware of that, but that's wonderful.

Many of her contemporaries considered her a teller of tall tales (as portrayed in the film to humorous effect) who exaggerated her links to more famous frontier figures, and some insisted Hickok did not even particularly like her.

But when she died 27 years later at the relatively young age of 51 in 1903, decades after Hickok, who was shot at age 39 in 1876, friends buried her beside him at her request; four of the men on the self-appointed committee who planned Calamity's funeral in 1903 (Albert Malter, Frank Ankeney, Jim Carson, and Anson Higby) later stated that, since Hickok had "absolutely no use" for Jane in this life, they decided to play a posthumous joke on him by laying her, as she requested, to rest by his side.