I watch two movies about entertainers: a beloved American icon and a beloved Chicago murderess. The latter brings out my inner fuddy duddy.
yankee doodle dandy
A testimonial: My mom and I watched this the night I picked her up from the hospital after a procedure to remove her gallbladder. YDD provided sufficient enjoyment that she temporarily forgot her nausea. We both agreed that James Cagney “was so George M. Cohan”, we had trouble keeping their personal stories straight in our minds.
YDD may play fast and loose with Cohan’s chronology (I kept looking up the dates of songs and shows on Wikipedia and getting confused), but its re-enactments of the Cohan family’s acts leading up to and during the early years of Broadway are spot on. For me, YDD appeals as an article of musical history. I like that Cohan himself approved the movie just before his death in 1942 and that vaudevillian Eddie Foy appears as himself in the film. I like to think that some of the audience members in the movie houses of 1942 would have seen Cohan live on the stage. Cagney, once a vaudevillian, brings a believable, matter-of-fact-ness to his performance — there’s nothing over the top or stagey — and he is a remarkable dancer (watch a clip on TCM).
A little longer than 2 hours, YDD keeps pace and manages to keep Cohan’s life story as interesting as the many musical numbers. The whole movie serves as an excellent survey of Cohan’s great songs — I have a new favorite, which I hadn’t heard before: “Mary Is a Grand Old Name.” I found Cohan’s relationship with his wife (actually his second wife, but the movie skips that fact), played by Joan Leslie (Grace Williams of Sergeant York) immensely adorable and his strong bond with his father (Walter Huston) touching.
The story of Cohan’s life is framed as a flashback while he talks with President Roosevelt, just before his receipt of the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions as a morale-boosting songwriter during WWI. This movie about his life served as a morale-booster for WWII. Cagney has a line that he might as well have delivered into the camera: “We’ve got this thing licked.” Having watched a series of rah-rah WWII movies, I’m catching the patriotic fever and YDD makes me even prouder than I already was of my country’s musical past. I can’t believe I missed the statue of Cohan in Times Square on my last visit to New York. Anyone who’s going by . . . “give my regards to Broadway” and to the man who owns it.
roxie hart
Before Chicago, there was Roxie Hart (itself a remake of an earlier silent film). Ginger Rogers stars as a gum-chewing, “black bottom” dancer who will do anything — including allow herself to be framed for murder — to get publicity. Every moment from Roxie’s jail time to her trial is a show, crafted by her lawyer (Adolphe Menjou). He even mouths along the words of the script when Roxie is on the stand. Buoyed by the encouragement that no jury would ever hang a woman, Roxie has no fear that she’ll end up on the gallows. Like some kind of twisted reality TV show, she is all too eager to accept the blame for the death of theatrical agent Fred Casely if it means everyone in Chicago will know her name.
Nearly every character is a caricature; in fact, the principles even play caricatures playing caricatures! Roxie is a saucy minx who craves attention, yet pretends to be an ingenue for the jury (and she is a pretty bad actress); her rich, scheming lawyer channels an overworked slave to justice; her criminal husband (the actual murderer) acts the part of befuddled hayseed taken advantage of by that ragtime-dancing city girl. The only honest person is a young, gentle-spirited reporter (George Montgomery) who (inexplicably) falls for Roxie.
The movie relies too heavily on the “hilarity” of these stock characters to deliver its satirical story. Though I’ll concede that Roxie Hart does get one thinking about gender, manipulation of the media, and theater in the courtroom, I personally don’t need to see another movie that reinforces the idea that men go dumb at the sight of a woman’s legs. Plus, even after we see Roxie’s unskilled, but effective handling of the press, instead of going on to get her big career in dance, she ends up driving a Studebaker (does that equal large, spacious car in everyone else’s mind?) packed with young children and babies — all hers and she doesn’t seem that happy about it.
Ginger’s transformation for the film into a trashy showgirl shocked me (that shock is really to her credit as an actress) and it took most of the movie for me to get over it. Clearly, she was having a ball while away from the debonair Fred. I’m not usually affected physically by people chewing gum, but her exaggerated chomping really put me off as did Roxie’s character. Sorry, Ginger, this wasn’t one of my favorites!
Lanahj 