Classic Movie Review: Yankee Doodle Dandy
By Stephanie Star Smith
May 3, 2004
Jimmy Cagney started his career in Hollywood playing rough-and-tumble characters, most of them either on the wrong side of the law or walking that thin line between legal and illegal activity. He ended his career playing gruff-but-loveable characters in positions of authority, hard-bitten on the outside but with a heart of gold and a fierce affection for his family/employees/the men under his command. But before Cagney became famous for shoving half a grapefruit in a woman's mush and standing atop a water tower screaming, "Top o' the world, Ma!," he was a song-and-dance man.
Yes, you read that right; Jimmy Cagney, tough-guy extraordinaire, started in show business as a musical performer on the vaudeville circuit.
It's certainly difficult to picture Cagney as anything but a macho gangster or soldier, but in fact, Cagney began his acting career as a female impersonator in vaudeville. Once famously quoted as saying, "Once a song-and-dance man, always a song-and-dance man. Those few words tell as much about me professionally as there is to tell," in 1942, Cagney got the chance to show this facility to audiences when he starred in the musical biopic of legendary composer and vaudevillian George M Cohan. The role was cited by Cagney as his favorite, and also brought the actor his sole Best Actor Oscar.
So why should audiences weaned on CGI, THX and wire stunts care about an old actor and an even older composer of songs they barely know?
The biggest reason is seeing Cagney as Cohan. Unlikely as the casting may seem on paper, it is the perfect match, with Cagney demonstrating what a talented song-and-dance man he was. His unique style of moving lent itself to a fascinating take on the choreography, nimbly handled in his own inimitable style. And while one would not ordinarily think of Cagney's voice as particularly musical, he seemed to have much the same range as Cohan himself; the songs are as entertaining and delightful as the movie itself. Yankee Doodle Dandy is a somewhat-fictionalized version of Cohan's life story, strong on the Hollywood style of the era that plays down the difficulties a famous person may have had - unless they demonstrate his famous "pluck" - but the tale of one of the most successful Broadway performers, producers and composers of the early 20th century makes for fascinating stuff. It may even surprise some of those jaded moviegoers just how many of the songs they have heard in movies and TV shows were written by Cohan, including the title song.
Another reason might be the chance to see what all the fuss was about over colorization. For those of you who may not remember - or may not have been around - Ted Turner, now the purveyor of a movie channel that does justice to older films, was once at the forefront of the movement to change Hollywood's history. Not just by showing films pan-and-scan, or cutting them so they'd fit two hours less commercials, but by colorizing the old black-and-white films. Somehow the thinking went that "kids today" had never seen a black-and-white film, and if you wanted to get an audience for the older stuff, you had to change it to fit the times. Yankee Doodle Dandy was the most famously colorized film, and it not only showed how poor the technology was, but how pointless it was to try and change a beloved film in order to bring in a new audience. Not only didn't the film catch on with younger viewers, but those who already loved the film created such an uproar that the entire idea was eventually abandoned. Turner did, however, manage to create an interest in the older movies in their original format amongst younger viewers; I suspect that, more than any sort of remorse over his actions in the '80s, led to the creation of Turner Classic Movies.
But the biggest reason for spending two-plus hours of your life enjoying Yankee Doodle Dandy is to watch Jimmy Cagney playing a role he so obviously savors, singing and dancing his way across the screen, smiling all the while, and making us smile right along with him.
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