Word: hoofers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Like the comedy, the plot is a little overdone. Miss Hayworth is hustled into marriage because her Argentine father (Adolphe Menjou) insists that she wed before her younger sisters. Fred Astaire, a momentarily unemployed Yankee hoofer, gets mixed up in it and, against Father's wishes, walks off with both a job and Rita. These complications are set to smooth music by Jerome Kern, which is served up, with whipped cream, by Xavier Cugat. Hoofer Astaire sings two tunes aptly enough to raise one of Bing Crosby's sleepy eyebrows, conducts Miss Hayworth through a lush nocturnal duet...
...Astaire and Bing Crosby supply able song-and-dance accompaniment,a t the same time filling the order for time-worn romantic conflict. Round one goes to Astaire when the tranquil night club trio of Crosby, Astaire, and Virginia Dale splits up, Crosby retiring to a farm, while his hoofer pal wins the gal and goes on hoofing...
...cinemactors appear to take more pains than Hoofer Astaire, less pains than Crooner Crosby. Result: Crosby's easy, casual banter is just the right foil for Astaire's precision acrobatics, his wry, offbeat humor...
...loving care on any hero as this one does on beaming, buoyant, wry-mouthed George M. (for Michael) Cohan. The result is a nostalgic, accurate re-creation of a historic era of U.S. show business. Not that the picture is a strict reconstruction of the playwright-songwright-actor-producer-hoofer's life. But star-spangled George M. Cohan, now 63, ailing, and confined to his upstate New York farm, was the kind of entertainer who really liked to entertain people, and Yankee Doodle has caught his spontaneous warmth...
...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...