It's DVD Friday!

Really? Yankee Doodle Dandy? You couldn't think of anything better than Yankee Doodle Dandy? On July 3rd? REALLY?

Yes, really. Honest. Not because I'm feeling very patriotic today, but July 3rd does remind me of James Cagney's glorious performance as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, the one time the diminutive firecracker was able to showcase his song-and-dance skills to their fullest extent in front of a motion picture camera. And if any performance exemplifies the motion in motion pictures, it's Cagney's in this film. If you can ever catch a copy of the colorized version of this film, lo, from those dark days in the 1980's that saw the height of that egregious practice, you will notice the amazing phenomenon of the computerized colors being unable to keep up with Cagney. I remember that specific colorized clip of Cagney singing the title song on Siskel & Ebert as the two critics explained why colorization was evil and should be stopped.

Granted, a super-patriotic film without the ol' red, white and blue seems a little odd and considering that Warner Bros. seemed perfectly willing to shell out the bucks to film Cagney's Captain of the Clouds in Technicolor the same year Yankee Doodle Dandy was made (1942, by the way), it's even odder. But oh well. I'll take black and white over poor color any day of the week.

James Cagney had gotten his start at Warner Bros. in 1930 when they signed him and Joan Blondell up to appear in an adaptation of their Broadway hit Penny Arcade for the screen. Retitled Sinners' Holiday for the screen, the film is unexceptional, even for the early days of talking pictures, and Cagney didn't make much of a mark in a supporting role. Bouncing around in supporting roles for the better part of a year, it wasn't until William Wellman's The Public Enemy that Cagney was made a star, inhabiting the psychotic rage of gangster Tom Powers with such ferocity that the studio did the only thing that studios did, do and and always will do: pigeonhole the actor into one kind of role.

However, on the stage, Cagney was a hoofer, a song-and-dance man, certainly one of the most unique ones in American history, a song-and-dance man who could kind of sing and whose dancing style was completely and utterly his own. Cagney was able to practice his craft only a couple of times in the 1930's: in Busby Berkeley's Footlight Parade (and even so, only has one full musical number) and the 1937 independent production Something to Sing About, which is a fun film but is saddled today by existing in horribly muddy public-domain prints. Yankee Doodle Dandy is the Cagney musical and it's great fun.