There is a moment early in Yankee Doodle Dandy when James Cagney, playing George M. Cohan as a boy performing on a vaudeville stage, turns to the audience with his chin out and his eyes bright and something in his posture that says: I know exactly what I’m doing and I know you know it too. He’s maybe twenty seconds into the performance. The audience in the film laughs. The audience watching the film laughs. Eighty years later, nothing about it has aged.
The studio wanted Fred Astaire. Cohan wanted Cagney. Cagney had spent a decade at Warner Bros. playing small men with large tempers — gangsters and hoods and street-level tough guys with chips on their shoulders the size of Prohibition-era grievances. Nobody saw a song-and-dance man in there. But Cagney had been one before Hollywood got to him, and the moment he starts moving you understand why Cohan approved the casting. The style is specific and a little odd — chin forward, elbows sharp, a lean into every step that makes dancing look like an argument he’s winning. It’s not elegant. Cohan wasn’t elegant. It’s something better than elegant.
Production began December 8, 1941 — the day after Pearl Harbor. The cast and crew, according to Rosemary DeCamp, who played Cohan’s mother, felt they might be sending the last message from the free world. Whether that was true or not, it got into the film. Director Michael Curtiz — the Budapest-born craftsman who was simultaneously making Casablanca down the hall — gave Cagney more latitude than he usually gave anyone, and Cagney used every inch of it.
The White House staircase scene, where Cohan tap-dances his way down after meeting FDR, happened because Cagney thought of it five minutes before the take and didn’t ask anyone. Curtiz kept it. The farewell scene between Cagney and Walter Huston, as Cohan’s dying father, reportedly made Curtiz sob so loudly he nearly ruined a take. He stumbled away to find a handkerchief and told Cagney, in whatever mangled English he was famous for, that it was marvelous. It is.
Huston plays Jerry Cohan with the quiet authority of a man who has been performing his whole life and stopped needing to prove it. He earned an Oscar nomination for the role and deserved it. Jeanne Cagney plays Josie, Cohan’s sister — and was, in fact, James Cagney’s real sister, which gives their scenes together an ease that no amount of rehearsal could have produced. Joan Leslie plays Mary, Cohan’s wife, and the film never mentioned that her singing voice belonged to Sally Sweetland. Nobody needed to know.
The script sanitizes Cohan considerably — he divorced and remarried, a fact the film erases entirely, giving him one wife and a clean American narrative. It doesn’t matter. The songs are real, and they carry more weight than any screenplay could manufacture. “Over There” and “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” were written by an actual man who watched American soldiers march off to two world wars and sat down each time and wrote the music that followed them out the door. When Cagney sings them in this film, they land accordingly.
The “You’re a Grand Old Flag” sequence is the one people still talk about, and it earns every conversation. It starts as a stage number and opens into a montage that has no business working — Boy Scouts dissolving into Revolutionary War soldiers dissolving into freed slaves gathered around a Lincoln statue — and it works completely, because the film commits to it without a single frame of hesitation or irony. It was made to make you feel something. It does.
When the film was finished, it was screened privately for Cohan, who was dying. He watched Cagney play him for two hours and ten minutes, and when it was over he said four words about the performance.
“My God, what an act to follow.”
He died four months later. Cagney won the Oscar. The film is in the National Film Registry, on the AFI’s list of the hundred greatest American movies, and available to rent on most streaming platforms for less than four dollars. It is worth considerably more than that.
Three Academy Awards in 1943: Best Actor, Best Score, Best Sound Recording. Eight nominations total, including Best Picture and Best Director.
