I DARE SAY —
Yankee Doodle Dandy
By Florence Fisher Parry
Years ago, I saw a motion picture Public Enemy. The Pennsylvania censors had hacked it to pieces, but even so, the performance of Jimmy Cagney burst through the celluloid like a lion through a flaming hope. The boy was show-stuff!
Ever since then, we’ve been seeing him – in brat roles, gangster roles, hoofer roles, whatnot. And never mind how cheap the picture, or how thin the role, Jimmy Cagney never missed. It’s funny how you can spot them, those born-to-bes-of-the-theater. You look at them, and you wonder what life could have held for them without the show business to live in. The Walter Hustons, the Georgie Cohans, the John Barrymores, the Mickey Rooneys…
Well, I saw Cagney last night in Yankee Doodle Dandy, and looking at his performance it seemed to me that all that had gone before in his life had been leading up just to this. You often feel that way about people.
Hamlet was Barrymore’s destiny, Andy Hardy Mickey Rooney’s, and Yankee Doodle Dandy is Jimmy Cagney’s. In George M. Cohan’s day, he’d have been George M. Cohan, or someone an awful lot like him!
I’ve seen a lot of memorable screen performances in my day – Huston’s Abraham Lincoln, Cooper’s Sergeant York, and-- oh, I could set down here a couple dozen others – but none of them took the versatility that is Jimmy Cagney’s to show when he undertakes to portray the life – and performances – of George M. Cohan!
He’s as fresh and American as Cohan ever was – he dances and mugs just as well. He possesses the same born showmanship. The picture is grand, but Jimmy is grander. Here’s my little Blue Ribbon for the best piece of acting the screen has produced in a decade.
Ah, yesterday!
Maybe you have to have lived about a half-century to care for Yankee Doodle Dandy – I don’t know. I sat beside youngsters; they liked it all right – they were really surprised that the old songs had so much to them. They found themselves swaying to “The Warmest Baby in the Bunch” and “Harrigan.” They found themselves melting when they heard “Mary Is a Grand Old Name” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.” And when they listened to “It’s a Grand Old Flag” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy” they felt like joining something or other – and then when they heard “Over There” they knew what it was they wanted to join, all right – this crusade, this war! It was interesting to watch these youngsters and the way they responded to those wonderful old tunes that George M. Cohan wrote 30 or 40 years ago.
Of course, you might know that the best thing in the picture is that part that shows how “Over There” came to be written. Georgie has had a flop, an awful flop. He is sick and stunned, and he can’t take it – and he walks out of the theater and there are the extras – THE LUSITANIA SUNK!
And he stands on the corner of 42nd and Broadway, with the feverish crowds jostling him, and on his face is registered on the face of all us Americans last Dec. 7. Why, what does his own life, or its success or failure, amount to now? Nothing matters but American – nothing matters but saving America.
And he walks over to the recruiting office, as millions of our boys are doing today, and he tries to enlist. And they won’t have him because he’s too old – that’s happening today too, all over.
Well, he stands there near his theater, and the bugler is blowing, and the soldiers start marching past him. There’s something in their step, there’s something in the note of the bugle, that catches his ear; and in that seizure of creativeness that only artists know, he walks back into the theater and sits down on the empty stage at a piano – and with one finger he starts to drum out “Ta-ta-ta, Ta-ta-ta.”
And then occurs one of the finest moments the screen had ever created: you see, you hear – you feel – a song take shape that is to shake the world – “Over There.”
It pays to have lived
We know what the power of that song was, and what it is today, revived as it has been for this bigger need. But you have to see that show, if only for that moment.
Is it because I love the theater so, that pictures like these have such a special power to move me? Be that as it may, it’s something insupportably sad to me in being shown a glamorous page of the past, when you know the ending. In Yankee Doodle Dandy, we see Fay Templeton, a great star on Broadway, the toast of the town. We know she died penniless and forgotten – yes, right here in Pittsburgh, where she spent most of her wealth – forgotten and neglected.
We see in Yankee Doodle Dandy a sharp-toned boarding-housekeeper, in just a little instant – and we remember her as a cyclonic young musician with a violin, singing in a voice of fire and passion “Play, Gypsy, Play” – and we know it is Odette Myrtil, forgotten now, a bit player in Hollywood.
It is memories like this that make the picture Yankee Doodle Dandy take on even a greater loveliness. Those younger ones around you may be laughing, and vastly entertained. But you are sitting there among them lost in memories that tear at your heart and filly our eyes, and make you a ridiculous object to those short-memoried ones around you.