Yankee Doodle Dandy
Rating: 3 out of 5.
Many words came to mind when this DVD arrived rather promptly in my mailbox on Saturday. Most of those words I probably shouldn’t repeat. For the past week my buddy Brandon and I had been chewing over the fact that if we were going to start reviewing AFI’s 100 Years, 100 Movies, it’d have to start with this one.
Brandon has his own review site (a permanent link is also located to your left under “Other Players”), and hopefully he’ll have his review posted sometime next week. He’s been on the road working, so he can’t post as often as he’d like. This traveling is what has brought him to my humble home on numerous occasions over the past couple of months.
The previous weekend found us searching 3 different video stores looking for a DVD copy of Yankee Doodle Dandy and we (thank goodness) came up short. I think there was a huge sigh of relief from Brandon (as well as myself) when we couldn’t find a decent copy to rent. Hollywood Video was the only proprietor that carried a copy, but my VCR has been decommissioned for several years (and I can’t stand the poor quality compared to DVD). Brandon left for work on Sunday afternoon, safely avoiding the singing and dancing extravaganza for another weekend.
Well, another week had past, and by Saturday afternoon, a copy of Yankee Doodle Dandy laid resting in my mailbox. I renewed my subscription to Netflix on Friday morning before leaving for work, much to Brandon’s surprise. I’ll have to admit that Netflix’s turnaround time for getting your first movie is excellent (just as long as they have it in stock).
Upon arrival, Brandon’s only request (other than to destroy the disc) was that there wasn’t a sufficient amount of beer in the house for the two hour movie. I gladly permitted a beer run and we started the film shortly after.
On a completely separate side note, Warner Bros. 2-disc collector sets of classic films can sometimes be pretty neat (yes, I said neat… deal with it). Some have a feature entitled "Warner’s Night At The Movies", which provides you with a time capsule-like experience on what it would have been like if you had been around to watch this film in a theater back in the 1940s. This one started with a trailer (Casablanca) followed by a Newsreel, a live-action short ("Beyond the Line of Duty" narrated by our future President Ronald Reagan) and finally, a Warner Bros. Cartoon ("Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid") before leading into the feature film.
I called it a 30+ minute buffer delaying the inevitable.
So, after sitting through 30 minutes of World War II propaganda and an amusing Bugs Bunny cartoon, Yankee Doodle Dandy was off and running.
I was rather surprised that it didn’t fall into the general standard definition of what I would call a “musical.” Not that there wasn’t any singing and dancing… because there was plenty of that. However, all of it took place directly on the stage of whatever production that was taking place at that time. These scenes dragged, but they always do when you don’t want them singing, let alone dancing, in the first place.
[For those curious, my general standard definition of a “musical” is as follows: Some jackass who felt it necessary to break out into song (possibly even dance, but not necessary) while in the middle of a conversation, to express his or her mood in order to “carry” the story along, thus destroying any credibility I have for that movie anymore.]
Yankee Doodle Dandy is the loosely-based (and I use that term loosely) bio-pic of George M. Cohan. Cohan was known as "the man who owned Broadway." A playwright, composer, producer, director, actor, singer and dancer spanning several decades in the early 20th Century and is considered to be the father of the American musical comedy.
Born on July 3rd or 4th, 1878 (the date is apparently disputed), Cohan was born into the world of theater and vaudeville and toured with his family, "The Four Cohans" before eventually breaking away, gaining success and bringing his family back into his business on Broadway.
Michael Curtiz, best known for Casablanca, directs James Cagney to his only Academy Award-winning role as the exuberant playwright, who shows off his obvious talents as a skilled singer and tap dancer extraordinaire. The film doesn’t drag. In fact, it moves rather quickly, following Cohan from birth to a childhood actor, then from a pompous self-centered young actor to a stubborn pompous self-centered adult actor. This attitude gets him (and his family) blacklisted from any kind of work throughout the east coast until he decides to leave "The Four Cohans" to pursue his own work.
While reading a brief biography on Cohan, I rediscovered how Hollywood back then (and now) decided to ignore or change additional facts about the man and his history in order to suite the mood of the film. Now we all know that Hollywood takes liberties when doing a "based on a true story" film. This is a given. But when the man who it’s based on, attends the premiere and comments “It was a good movie. Who was it about?”, you tend to wonder how far it strayed from the truth.
Things they glossed over that stuck out my mind are just two basic facts: (1) He was the second born child of the Cohan family. The film states he was the first born. Not that this is extremely important, why would you change it in the first place? (2) George was only married to Mary Nolan. Agnes "Mary" Nolan was his second wife. He was married seven years to Ethel Levey and had two children. He had three more with Agnes, none of which are ever mentioned in the film. These changes, in my opinion, are insignificant. What else did they change that we don’t know about? Read the last sentence of the next paragraph.
I have to admit that I frequently find it hard to choke down the "everything is happy and has a happy ending" films of the 1940s and 1950s. I also can understand that it’s impossible to cram an entire lifetime into two hours. Either way, Cohan had to have more tragedies in his life than just his father dying, but do we get to see anything else through his life’s journey that wasn’t all happy-go-lucky? Not from Hollywood and not in 1942. That’s what books are for.
The film did, however, make me realize how many songs I knew that George M. Cohan wrote, including: "Give My Regards to Broadway", "Yankee Doodle Boy", "You’re a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There." That’s just 4 out of 1500 he wrote.
Other interesting trivia for this film include the fact that this was the very first black and white movie to be colorized using a controversial computer-applied process (I shudder at the thought). It was also the second highest grossing picture for Warner Bros. in 1942, earning a whopping $4.8 million. It was also released earlier than Warner Bros. had wanted. In a promotion to release it on July 4th (considered Cohan’s birthday), they moved it up to Memorial Day in May because of his fight with cancer. It also helped boost the morale of our country and the war effort since the bombing of Pearl Harbor only took place six months prior to it’s theatrical release.
Cohan was quite the patriot when it came to entertainment. His drive for patriotism with his music awarded him the first Congressional Gold Medal presented by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 in honor of his contributions to World War I morale.
Classic films like these are very hard for me to review. I tend to only lean one way or the other. I either like or dislike. This one kinda hits square in the middle. Cagney’s performance is fantastic and some of the comedy bits throughout the picture did produce several out loud laughs from myself.
In closing, I’m not sure if I can wrap my brain around why this picture is considered to be one of the 100 greatest pictures, but then again, I only question it because it’s all a matter of opinion. Would it be on my list? Absolutely not. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be on someone else’s. I could have easily replaced this picture with another on the list. Apparently there were 400 nominations and then, I presume, members of the American Film Institute voted on these to create the final 100.
As discussed earlier with other members of the house, I’m not completely sure why it’s on the list other than “the contribution it had to the craft at it’s time.” More of a time capsule picture, rather than something that stands the test of time, like Citizen Kane.
I have a feeling that this won’t be the last time I hear that phrase or use it myself.
