Word: cohan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...neat device, Showman Cohan (James Cagney) tells his life story to Franklin Roosevelt (Captain Jack Young) in the White House, where he is summoned to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. It is the story of a cocky, puckish, talented Irish-American, who accepted the accident of his birth on July 4, 1878 as an implied command to wave the Stars & Stripes forever. Critics called the act corny, but audiences recognized it for what it was: a born showman expressing a sincere emotion...
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...
...picture goes overboard with an elaborate presentation of You're A Grand Old Flag. But the simple restaging of Cohan's conception of his cocky war song, Over There, is enough to send movie audiences straight off to battle-especially as gusty Songstress Frances Langford sings it (with Johnny Get Your Gun) to 1917's doughboys. The rest, down through one of Cohan's last stage appearances (in I'd Rather Be Right, 1937), is anticlimax...
Canny Showman Cohan knew what he was doing when he insisted that Irish Jimmy Cagney was the one cinemactor who could play him. Smart, alert, hardheaded, Cagney is as typically American as Cohan himself. Like Cohan, he has a transparent personal honesty, a basic audience appeal. Like Cohan, he was once a hoofer...
With these attributes. Cagney manages to suggest George M. Cohan without carbon-copying the classic trouper. He has the Cohan trick of nodding and winking to express approval, the outthrust jaw, stiff-legged stride, bantam dance routines, side-of-the-mouth singing, the air of likable conceit. For the rest, he remains plain Jimmy Cagney. It is a remarkable performance, possibly Cagney's best, and it makes Yankee Doodle a dandy...