Yankee Doodle Dandy

Yankee Doodle Dandy is one of the best movies ever made.  Not greatest, mind you: as far as I know, it didn’t do much to change or advance the medium of film.  But it’s one of the best because it’s so energetic, so ebullient, so flag-wavingly patriotic, and so much fun that you can’t help but love it.

James Cagney plays George M. Cohan, a man who grew up performing with his family in vaudeville.  As he matured, he developed into a pillar of the Broadway scene.  He wrote, produced, and starred in hit after hit, and he penned canonical American music such as “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and “Over There.”  As the film tells it, he was also a swell guy.

This is a musical biography long on production numbers and Horatio Alger allusions, and it works due to Cagney’s effervescence.  And here’s the amazing thing: prior to this film, Cagney had been known as a ‘tough guy’ actor, with hits such as The Roaring Twenties and Angels with Dirty Faces.  When he sang and danced and mugged his way across the screen, audiences were as amazed as we would be if Jason Statham revealed that he’s been studying tap for the last twenty years and has the moves to prove it.  The film won Cagney an Academy Award for Best Actor and, though he went on to play tough guys once more in classics like White Heat, it changed Hollywood’s view of him forever.

But that’s neither here nor there.  For us, Yankee Doodle Dandy offers a delightful story, characters we can get behind, and production numbers we can remember for years to come.  As an added bonus, it has such a great ending that it motivates us to be better than ourselves.

This is a wonderful film.  If you haven’t, you owe it to yourself to see Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Sergeant York

hagiography, noun, pl. -phies.
1. the writing of saints' lives.
2. a book about saints' lives.
3. (Figurative.) a biography that adulates or idolizes its subject.

Sergeant Alvin York won the Medal of Honor in WWI for killing 22 Germans and forcing 132 others to surrender in battle in the Argonne Forest. French Marshal Ferdinand Foch called it "the greatest thing accomplished by any private soldier of all the armies of Europe." Hollywood told his story in 1941, just as America was gearing up for another go at the Germans.

Gary Cooper played the titular soldier, a man who sought conscientious objector status but rogered up when his application was denied. Though hampered by clunky dialogue (“I’m’a tellin’ ya that I’m’a gonna marry ya!”), Cooper gamely played the wide-eyed innocent, relying on the same bag of tricks he’d later use in PRIDE OF THE YANKEES. He does a fine job of giving us the sinner turned saint turned hero, and he’s aided by the great Walter Brennan in the role of backwoods pastor.

But there’s a problem with SERGEANT YORK. I fired up this movie expecting a WWI drama. What I got was a roughly 1.8-hr celebration of rural Tennessee wrapped around a brief military interlude. While I understand that I was watching a hagiography, I’d have been very interested to learn about how backwoodsmen like York fit into the Army culture of the WWI era. The more I think about it, the more this movie makes me want to see a modern retelling of York’s story. What was it like that day in the Argonne? How did York adjust to his status of national hero (This version tells us that he shrugged it off and went back to farming.)? Who was this guy?

On second thought, I don’t think a movie can answer all my questions about this interesting character. I’m off to the library.