Word: cohane
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...July takes that as his cue to make himself a one-man patriotic holiday, he's bound to turn out to be an intriguing character. And when a vigorously produced and directed movie is based on his career, top-flight entertainment is the result. George M. Cohan is such a character: "Yankee Doodle Dandy" is such a film, and the sum total is just what might be expected...
Containing most of Cohan's more popular songs with James Cagney in the title role. "Yankee Doodle Dandy" is as red, white, and blue a fautasy as Cohan himself could ask for. Cagney dances, sings, and mugs through a better than average story, and a wonderful series of songs. "Its A Grand Old Flag," "Mary," "Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway." "Over There," and a number of others are all done up in a flag-waving style that, fortunately, is never quite overdone...
...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...