Word: celluloid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Yankee Doodle tries hard to squeeze 50 years of Cohan Americana into two hours and six minutes of celluloid. It succeeds best with the early years-the tough, tender, Irish clannishness of The Four Cohans (Father Walter Huston, Mother Rosemary DeCamp, Daughter Jeanne Cagney,† Son Jimmy) and their variety act; Songwriter Cohan's accidental partnership with Sam H. Harris (Richard Whorf), his ambiguous first meeting with his future wife (Joan Leslie), who came backstage while young Cohan was playing his mother's father in Buffalo, N.Y. "I'm 18," she confided...
Most of these acts are taken from the files of the U.S. Senate Civil Liberties Committee. Producers Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand have dramatized them in sequences bound together by straight documentary interludes, highlighted them with perhaps the finest spoken commentary (Paul Robeson) ever recorded on celluloid and an effective musical score (Marc Blitzstein) accompanying the Robeson songs. The result, better as episodes than as a whole movie, is a shocking, stinging picture whose realism could never have been achieved in soft-stepping Hollywood...
...Invaders," newest celluloid to glorify the democratic way of life, brings to mind that part from "The Walrus and the Carpenter" that goes: "Four other oysters followed them, and yet another four; and thick and fast they came at last, and more, and more, and more--all hopping through the frothy waves, and scrambling to the shore." This particular oyster tastes a little different from "Night Train," "Man Hunt," "Mortal Storm," and "Confessions of a You-Know-What Spy," but it is unmistakably of the same brand of sea food...
...like Eddie Rickenbacker's famed Hat-in-the-Ring outfit of World War I, and its forefather, the polylingual Lafayette Escadrille, A.V.G. would live as yarns told in bars, in books, in celluloid...
...celluloid front, the U.S. still has no pattern except that which Mellett will provide when he gets around to it. Hollywood's and the Government's few war documentaries have been a hodgepodge of patriotic appeals, expositions on tank construction, sugar-coated shots of training troops, etc. These films have failed to keep the U.S. public informed on the progress of the war, to tell it why tires have to be rationed, to relate the vast complexity of global war to the individual citizen...