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.
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