Hoo boy. So this is a biography of George M. Cohan. If you’re like me right now, you’re saying “who the fuck was George M. Cohan?” and the answer is that he was apparently a very successful Broadway writer/composer/star/producer back in the dawn of the twencen. But the catch is, he was producing shitty garbage-tier musical comedies that time has (apparently justly) forgotten, such that all we remember these days is a few of the breakout songs from them. So this ends up feeling like a biography of Andrew Lloyd Webber or Michael Bay or something.

“Well, his work is forgotten, but maybe his life was interesting?” It was not. Here’s the story of it: He grows up as a kid in a family vaudeville act touring the country[1], and then he grew up and went solo to great success (with some false starts due to his cockiness pissing people off), before retiring and then briefly unretiring. He got a girlfriend who he eventually married, but that was also drama-free. As a human being, this is an admirably-lived life. As a subject for a movie, it’s bland as hell.

But that’s perfectly fine, because this is barely a real movie anyway. What it really feels like is a Hollywood producer being like “hey, all those super-popular song-and-dance numbers from Broadway, we should get them into a movie,” and then making this movie to do that. Which on the one hand is genius, because you can just go straight to the high points of the famous songs (Yankee Doodle Dandy! Over There! Grand Old Flag!) without having to show the entirety of the tedious, dated musicals that they came from. So it ends up like a “Greatest Hits” clip show. It’s even framed in clip show format, with him meeting with FDR near the end of his life and then being like “yes, I remember how it all began…” and then now we have a first-person narration of his life.

And so because the songs are the alleged draw, they milk the fuck out of them. Like here is an actual excerpt of the musical numbers (from Wikipedia):

  • “The Yankee Doodle Boy” – Sung and Danced by James Cagney, Joan Leslie (dubbed by Sally Sweetland) and Chorus.
  • “Mary’s a Grand Old Name” – Sung by Joan Leslie (dubbed by Sally Sweetland).
  • “Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway” – Sung by James Cagney.
  • “Mary’s a Grand Old Name” (reprise 1) – Sung by Joan Leslie (dubbed by Sally Sweetland).
  • “Mary’s a Grand Old Name” (reprise 2) – Sung by Irene Manning.
  • “Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway” (reprise) – Sung by Chorus.
  • “Over There” – Sung by Frances Langford, James Cagney and Chorus.
  • “Over There” (reprise) – Sung by James Cagney and Chorus.
  • “The Yankee Doodle Boy” (reprise) – Played by Orchestra behind end credits.

That’s four songs that we hear at least twice, one of them three times. If you don’t love these songs — and I do not; they are forgettable, samey, and bland (with the exception of Yankee Doodle Dandy, which is just terrible) — this raises tedium to the level of annoyance.

The genuinely astonishing thing to think about is that this came out in 1942, a year after Citizen Kane. Imagine having just watched Orson Welles’ quasi-biopic, and then watching this one and thinking “yes, these are both great movies, reaching very similar heights, definitely deserve to be on a list together.”

So this is where I should put the “to be fair” bit, and all I could come up with at first was “well, it’s not the worst movie on the AFI list,” which is less a defense of this movie than a condemnation of that list. But then I read this Ebert review, which inexplicably gives the movie four stars, and okay, he has a point that James Cagney is a compelling performer. So one cheer for James Cagney’s performance in a thankless role in a trash-ass movie.

That said, even generously, this is a piece of disposable fluff eighty years past its expiration date. And if it’s not the worst AFI movie I’ve watched, I’m pretty sure it ranks in the bottom five somewhere. This shouldn’t be on the list, and I have no idea why it is.

  1. (As an aside: When I told my wife that this was a musical from 1942, she’s like “I guarantee it has blackface” and so it does, in this section.) ↩︎