Here’s another masterpiece from TCM but I recorded it during the night some actress from The Sopranos was the guest programmer. Much like Singing in the Rain, I’ve always wanted to know what the fuss was, namely with my grandparents, they always knew the lyrics to these types of songs.
Yankee Doodle Dandy is a psuedo-biographical picture about the multi-talented George M. Cohan. Despite the story being a tad inaccurate chronologically and factually, it’s more of a propaganda piece to motivate everyone to fight the Nazis, hence its release in 1942. This doesn’t mean it’s an awful film, quite the opposite; it’s a more like a Greatest Hits video compilation with stretches of story and dancing to fill the gaps between numbers. It’s upbeat, it’s the story of the little guy beating the odds, so on. It’s a movie that reflects the time period it was made in and would flop on opening weekend in contemporary times. It also does offer a good, indirect explanation of how Cohan laid down the foundations to the modern Broadway musical. Now if Broadway could recapture the spirit of originality, it would stop remaking movies into musicals because The Wedding Singer was the last straw.
Cagney’s dancing and singing are supposedly the big surprises here, at least that’s what the common stories are. Seems he was the Christopher Walken of his day. I never had such a bias because I’d seen him play Cohan before in Bob Hope’s movie about Eddie Foy. I’d also watched him as the foil in Mr. Roberts and as an authority figure in Ragtime (his last movie role) long before I ever heard of Public Enemy Number One. Cagney’s tap dancing is pretty impressive, especially at his age during the principal filming. His singing was a bit more confusing, it sounded more like talking. My guess is that he was trying to emulate Cohan’s style.
This flick will never be on a Tarantino list yet I’m glad I saw it. I was very entertained by the window on the past it gave and it may have shed some more light on the world my grandparents lived in.