Yankee Doodle Dandy

James Cagney recalls in his autobiography that this movie was his favorite, largely due to his love of dancing. He was one of the great "tough guys" of all time on film, but dancing was his passion, he noted. It shows here. This was "a labor of love," to use a cliché, and it's obvious how much fun he was having in this film. His hoofing talent also was obvious. He was good, very good.

In fact, for the audience, most of this movie is pure "feel good." Almost all the characters are nice people, the story is inspirational and nicely patriotic and the songs are fantastic. If you pick up the two-disc special-edition DVD that came out several years ago, then you'll see this film in all it's glory. The transfer is magnificent and really brings out the great cinematography. I never realized how beautifully filmed this was until I saw this on DVD.

The story is simply the biography of George M. Cohan, the writer and Broadway star of many, many hit plays and hit songs. Unlike today's biographies, this is a very positive story about a man who brought patriotism alive during World War I with such inspirational songs as "It's A Grand Old Flag" and "Over There." For some of us, listening to these songs can bring a tear or two.

Cagney is his normal riveting self and Joan Leslie certainly makes an appealing female lead as Cohan's wife. The great Walter Huston plays Cohan's father. I've always found Huston to be an actor of great presence. In this movie is a very, very touching deathbed scene with he and Cagney.

So you have a little bit of everything here from drama to romance to comedy to music and Cagney is the glue to fits it all together beautifully. One of the great classic films of all time.

So it takes liberties with facts. So it's jingoistic. Big deal! I adore it for its depiction of turn-of-the-(20th}century New York, especially its theater, which has fascinated me for years. And it has the breath-taking performance of Jimmy Cagney in the title role; he's absolutely elecrifying in the musical numbers. If some scenes are mawkish, well, I think that can be forgiven.

This movie, above all others, make me so proud to be an American.

The amazing piece of timing here is when Warner Bros. began work on this biography of entertainer George M. Cohan, WWII had not yet broken out. The attack on Pearl Harbor occurred the day before shooting began. When the film opened people on the home front badly needed some morale boosting, and this film gave it to them. It's just a joyous musical costume piece from start to finish with nice comic touches balanced with some sentimental moments (supposedly Walter Huston's deathbed scene had even taskmaster director Michael Curtiz crying). There's nothing in the way of real conflict or even much heavy in the way of romance between Cohan and his fictitious film wife "Mary", who was modeled after Cohan's actual second wife in some ways. Cohan was actually married twice. Oddly enough, it was Cohan who said he wanted as little romance in the film as possible.

The more I learn about Cohan the more I realize that Cagney was perfect to play him - both Irish Americans, both about the same size and build, and George Cohan's style of dancing and singing were about the same as Cagney's. It's hard to believe that Fred Astaire was Cohan's first choice to play himself. Astaire was a great talent, but I don't think he could have conveyed the combination of mischief, optimism and energy that was Cohan the way that Cagney ultimately did. Several people criticize Cagney's dancing here, but that eccentric style was Cohan's, who always considered himself more of an overall entertainer than a dancer in the first place.

If you're "date conscious" as I am, there are some matters of plot that might bother you. Cohan was born on July 2 or 3, not July 4. Cohan's mother outlived his father by eleven years and Cohan's father was not "very old" when he died as is said in the film - at least by today's standards. When Cohan's father died in 1917, he was only 69. Cohan's sister did die young - she was only 39, dying in 1916, plus she was not his little sister. Instead Josie was a year older than George. The film has Josie marrying when she would have been close to forty, when she actually married at the beginning of the 20th century and thus was the one to break up the four Cohans, not George. Also, Cohan received his Congressional Medal in 1936, not as WWII began as shown in the film. However the plot device of having George M. recount his life story to FDR, receiving his Congressional medal in the Oval Office, and then dance joyously down the White House stairs and into the streets joining a group of marching soldiers in a chorus of "Over There" was probably a great way to bridge Cohan's patriotic past with what was then an uncertain time that certainly needed a dose of his optimism.

The one thing that I did find a little odd - and one thing isn't much in a two plus hour long movie - is that it is hard to spot the actual point in the film where Mary becomes George's wife. There is quite a bit of domesticity shown before the two were married. Mary is cooking for George, staying in his apartment alone waiting for him to come home from the show, and acting very much like they are already married. The only way you know they are not is that George very subtly pops the question to the point that I'm surprised even Mary knew what he was asking! I know this doesn't seem like much in today's world, but considering that they were trying to paint Cohan in the most positive light possible and that the living arrangements might be misunderstood, I am surprised that the censors of that time never raised the issue.

At any rate, I highly recommend this one. You'll have a great time, at least in part because you can see that Cagney is having a great time. He always said this film was his favorite, and it shows in his performance.

Right from the start, I have to say you do not need to be an American to be caught up in the excitement of the blatant flag waving tribute to a great artist. "Yankee Doodle Dandy" made to boost morale after the U.S. entered the war surely would have achieved its goal. It would have been even better in Technicolor (not the coloured version later shown). The songs were great, the acting and the individual dancing style of James Cagney was superb and deserved the Oscar. The two scenes featuring "Over There" were very moving with Frances Langford a standout! The story, while bearing small resemblance to real life, was good and Walter Huston and Rosemary de Camp were excellent. When you see a film such as this some 60 years after its release, and still really enjoy it, it shows how the Golden Years of Hollywood were just that.

James Cagney won his only Oscar for his recreation of George M. Cohgan in Yankee Doodle Dandy. Already terminally ill, Cohan lived long enough to see the film and no doubt he would have approved of it because it sure is how he would like to have been remembered.

In 1942 when Yankee Doodle Dandy premiered there was a whole generations of people left alive who saw George M. Cohan perform. Watching the film today Cohan is like a figure from antiquity. But Warner Brothers was lucky to have James Cagney with the studio who's dancing style closely paralleled Cohan's. If it is ever run on Turner Classic Movies, make sure you see George M. Cohan's sound film The Phantom President. You will be astonished to see how closely Cagney captured his style. In the same way that Philip Seymour Hoffman captured Truman Capote and Joaquin Phoenix became Johnny Cash.

Cohan's contemporaries are also like names from antiquity. But a century ago when Cohan was just hitting the big time performers like Fay Templeton, Nora Bayes, and Eddie Foy were very big stars and in 1942 plenty of people saw them also. I wish we had some film of them to see how Irene Manning, Frances Langford, and Eddie Foy, Jr. did in their recreations. I'm sure Foy, Jr. did a smashing job with his Dad.

The background stuff is true enough. Cohan was born to a pair of vaudeville performers Jerry and Nellie Cohan played here by Walter Huston and Rosemary DeCamp. Later on a sister was added to the Cohan family and here Josie Cohan is played by Jeanne Cagney. They did do all the towns, big and small, in America. Cagney meets wife Joan Leslie at Shea's Theater in Buffalo, New York and Shea's survives to this day. And his first real success was Little Johnny Jones which score included American classics, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Give My Regards to Broadway.

What's left out is the fact Cohan had two wives. His second wife survived him and died in the early Seventies. As his songs became popular in patriotic/rightwing circles, Cohan's personal politics reflected that. He fought hard and lost in the battle for Actors Equity. Cohan thought a union of players was tantamount to Communism. But such was his standing among performers that Cohan was granted the unique privilege of being allowed to appear on stage without having to join Equity once the union was recognized as the bargaining agent for players.

Cohan is shown in Yankee Doodle Dandy as gracefully having retired when other trends in popular music took over. Far from it, he was a very bitter man and when he did that final comeback in I'd Rather Be Right he fought with Kaufman and Hart over the book and Rodgers and Hart over the songs.

But Yankee Doodle Dandy presents the public musical face of George M. Cohan and does it very well. To this day, some forty years after first seeing Yankee Doodle Dandy on television, I love the recreations of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Give My Regards to Broadway, and You're a Grand Old Flag as they were first seen on stage. Plus some of the snatches of the lesser known Cohan songs as performed by the players portraying the Cohan family and others.

When all is said and done, George M. Cohan was a great force of nature in the American musical theater. And we thank his father, mother, and sister, and George M. himself for what he left us.