Le président fantôme

George M. Cohan who in the first decade of the last century was as the title of one of his songs and biography The Man Who Owned Broadway was considered old fashioned by 1932. Still as a performer he had considerable box office and he responded to the pleas of Jesse L. Lasky to come over to Paramount to make his sound motion picture debut. But the songs were to be written by a pair of relative newcomers Rodgers&Hart.

It's come down in show business legend how Cohan barely dealt with them while The Phantom President was in production. He thought they were second rate songwriters and truth be told Cohan thought just everyone else was second rate next to him. He had that kind of ego. But he had the talent to back it up and truth be told the songs that Dick and Larry wrote for this film were truly second rate.

The musical format of this film was song patter, no individual numbers that could have been hits were written for The Phantom President. The patter format worked well in Love Me Tonight and Hallelujah I'm A Bum, but many song hits came from Love Me Tonight and Hallelujah I'm A Bum boasted You Are Too Beautiful from that score. Nothing like that comes from The Phantom President. Maybe Cohan could have written a better score, in fact he was given one number to be interpolated.

But The Phantom President is first rate political satire with Cohan playing a double role, a cold fish millionaire who is running for President of the USA and a carnival medicine show man that his political handlers recruit to go out and do the campaign as he's got a personality the voting public will warm up to.

The political end works well, but carnival Cohan starts cutting in on millionaire Cohan's time with Claudette Colbert a former president's daughter and someone who the millionaire thinks would be a great first lady. He takes some drastic action.

The four handlers are well cast also, George Barbier, Louise Mackintosh, Sidney Toler, Julius McVickers are all familiar enough in roles that are suited to all of them. And of course we have Jimmy Durante who is gloriously himself with some interpolated material for him as well in the song Schnozzola.

There are so many performers whose salad days were well before talking motion pictures were invented that we should be grateful that at least we can see something of what Broadway saw with George M. Cohan. And his dancing style; well you can see why James Cagney was cast in the autobiographical Yankee Doodle Dandy.

If you saw Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy, you've got the wrong idea. George M. Cohan was the smoothest song-and dance-man of them all, not the edgy fireball that Cagney portrayed. (No knock to Cagney; but he couldn't repress his natural energies) Watching Cohan, the original, is a delightful experience.

The plot is a fairly funny political satire. A politician with just what it takes to be president, but none of the "good American sex appeal" needed to get elected, finds an exact double: a medicine show charlatan. The medicine show man is hired to pinch hit for campaign purposes. His sidekick (Durante) comes along for the ride. They turn the medicine show into the convention. Durante does one of his famous "I won't talk on the radio" routines. It's, overall, light fare, but thoroughly enjoyable.

This film used to be shown on New York City local TV every four years on Election Night. Now, it seems to be virtually impossible to see. Too bad Universal (which owns the old Paramount films) doesn't dig it out of the vault and put it on Video.

All the actors sparkle here, even Durante (who killed more than one MGM feature in his day) is a riot. Colbert is dazzling in every scene, even while bathing a dog. Cohan is fresh and fun, too bad he didn't make any other talkies. This production wreaks of Paramount, right down to the Lubitch touches of rhyming dialogue and animals delivering a musical number laced with sexual innuendo. In one instance the camera dissolves from the back side of a jackass to the keynote speaker of the Presidential convention; some things never change and it's still fresh!

Will Hays would have had a lot to say about this production if he could have gotten his hands on it.... :)

Light weight but winning political satire even in its day, the big news in this well reviewed Rodgers and Hart not-quite-musical (there are just four main musical sequences - the best known song is "Give Her A Kiss") was George M. Cohan's first appearance in a talkie - he would make but one more in 1934 (GAMBLING), three years before Cohan returned to Broadway with Rodgers & Hart in their 1937 hit I'D RATHER BE RIGHT, playing a real president - FDR.

Playing the dual role here of a candidate and his more likable double, Cohan more than justified the hype, and ably assisted by the always wonderful Claudette Colbert as the candidate's girlfriend (shades of THE PRISONER OF ZENDA) and Jimmy Durante who almost steals the film as the nice Cohan's manager (catch Durante in MGM's 1934 STUDENT TOUR playing a crew coach named Merman in an in joke!), Cohan makes this a must-see in any year. In an election year like this one, we can only wish the finale were reality rather than a gentle satire of pandering to public perceptions.

The pleasant surprises don't stop with the leads however. Watch the singing portraits of past presidents in the opening for Alan Mowbray as George Washington and later, Sidney (Charlie Chan) Toler's appearance as a political boss - all smiles but as rooted in what "works" as any current campaign manager - is a joy to behold.

If you've seen Jimmy Cagney dancing to an Oscar as Cohan in the World War II YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (a decade after this effort), take a look at Cohan doing the original steps (in black-face, yet in an "on stage" number) and you'll wonder if Cagney didn't study this film specifically.

In the great legacy of film musicals, THE PHANTOM PRESIDENT is probably little more than a footnote, but it's a very enjoyable, important one.

Apparently George M. Cohan, American Theatrical Giant and God, was one of the most difficult men to work with. Cohan did not like taking orders from others - after all, his productions were of plays or revues or musical comedies he wrote, composed, staged, directed, and starred in himself. But when he was asked to do THE PHANTOM PRESIDENT in 1932 he had to be directed by Norman Taurog and sing the songs of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. That these two song writers were as good as he had been in his heyday did not matter - the only rival composer he liked was Irving Berlin, who waived the flag as well as George M. himself. Early on he showed his dislike for the two song writers, which they did not appreciate. He also did not care for making movies (he had made a couple of silent films of one or two plays, and several of his plays were made into movies). So THE PHANTOM PRESIDENT would be one of only two forays into talkies that George M. would take.

It is not the failure or mediocrity that many critics have considered it to be (including Cohan, and Rodgers and Hart). The tunes demonstrate the inventiveness of the composer and lyricist, who experimented here with their "talk - sing" dialogue in the convention sequence, in the President Picture introduction ("The Country Needs a Man"), and in the snake-oil scene. This is a dry run for the similar scenes in their Hollywood masterpieces LOVE ME TONIGHT and HALLELUJAH, I'M A BUM. The chemistry between Cohan and Claudette Colbert is actually good, as is the balance of the smooth Cohan and the explosive Durante. And there are lots of nice little bits by Durante (his election speech on the radio is marvelous), and one unexpected person: Sidney Toler as Professor Aikenhead. An advisor to the party expecting to run Blair for the Presidency, he is an early expert on spin control. Quickly he developes his own niche in the story - an underplayed, common-sensical sense of humor. He wants to see how loveable a character Blair is...a dubious proposition. He gets an apple, and tells Blair to hand it to a nearby horse. "Why?", asks a suspicious Cohan (here as Blair). Unruffled and smiling, Toler just replies, "Because you can't sell it to him!" Toler should have made more comedies, but when he does appear in comedies (like IT'S IN THE BAG) he has a good sense of timing.

But most intriguing is Cohan himself. This is his one surviving example of acting in a talkie, and he does nicely all considered. But he would not appear in another film where he had to take orders from others (in this case Taurog, a highly successful film director from the early 1930s to the 1950s). In 1935 Cohan financed a filming of his own play GAMBLING - this time being in charge of the whole production. It has not survived, and descriptions of it suggest it has little to offer us. Still, one hopes it will one day reappear, just to see Cohan at his dramatic peak. He made it just after appearing in Eugene O'Neill's AH WILDERNESS (his first appearance in a non-Cohan play), and got some of the best reviews in his career for that. GAMBLING, made just afterwards, should have been of some interest. We may never know.

After GAMBLING Cohan returned to the "legitimate" stage. Ironically it was for his last major role: playing FDR in I'D RATHER BE RIGHT, a musical comedy by Kaufman and Hart, with music by (ironically) Rodgers and Hart. If you see Jimmie Cagney in YANKEE DOODLE DANDY he does a scene from I'D RATHER BE RIGHT ("Off the Record!") which had new lyrics for the 1942 film regarding World War II. Cagney's Cohan praises Rodgers and Hart in the film - but in reality he still argued with them. He was forced to make comments against his friend Al Smith in the show, and he really disliked FDR. But the real Cohan was shown YANKEE DOODLE DANDY before he died in November 1942. The old trouper liked it.