#100. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

From the description alone I had very, very low expectations for this movie. James Cagney in an overly patriotic musical propaganda piece about George M Cohan "The Father of Broadway" combines at least 3 things I don't like.

However, my favorite genre is the Bio-Pic... oooh dilemma!

Now, for those of you who don't know, biopics in the early days of cinema were significantly more kind to the subject than they are now. Anyone who has ever seen and cringed at "The Babe Ruth Story" with William Bendix or "The Spirit of St. Louis" knows what I am talking about. You will seldom get a great biopic of somebody's life when they are still alive and can influence the picture (not that it is always great when some ambitious director hijacks someone's bones for the sake of a good story- "Finding Neverland" and "The Buddy Holly Story" taught us that).

The thing that surprised me the most about this movie was the fact that the script seems to have been written mostly by comedy writers. Despite the fact that it was released just months after the U.S. entered into World War II and the subject matter dealt with a man who wrote flag-draped patriotic anthems and proudly touted his "Born on the 4th of July and named after George Washington" status, it was a surprisingly light-hearted film.

I also thought it was a very ambitious undertaking to try and combine biographical films and musicals, although it IS about a Broadway performer, so in some ways it could be argued that this would be the only way to approach this film. The creativity lies in the fact that, like most musicals, the director didn't attempt to use songs to tell the story, but rather integrated all the songs the same way they would have been presented to an audience, in the context of a performance.

One of the most impressive aspects of this movie was the way the process that goes into the creation of a song was depicted. I don't know how accurate it was, but I am a music man first and a movie man second, so I was also sucked in by this aspect of the narrative.

"My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you and I thank you" (George M. Cohan, "Yankee Doodle Dandy"

I actually experienced belly laughs at this film, especially since finding humor in topics like alcohol abuse, child discipline and gender roles is a fine line to walk and I would love to have seen how it was received in the 1940's. If the rest of the movies on this list that I have low expectations for entertain me the way this one did then I am in for several pleasant surprises over the next year. I want to go out and learn more about George Cohan, and I have no doubt that, as an accurate depiction of a man's life, this movie probably falls extremely short of reality, but some of the best bio-pics I've seen are guilty of this ("Chaplin" and "Cobb" come to mind). All in all, it was everything I expected it to be, overly patriotic, syrupy, watered-down and completely sanitized the life of a showbiz family, but for anyone who is not a George Cohan expert, you will find yourself saying no fewer than a half dozen times, "Oh my God, he wrote that song!?"

After watching this movie, my wife and I were both dismayed to learn that there is a statue of George M. Cohan in Times Square and we have never visited it... Sounds like as good an excuse as any for a trip to New York again ;)