Announcements for Week of 2/4-6

For Mon, 2/4

• 2 bluebooks (if I don't have them yet)
• read: blog notes on Casablanca, Hollywood Goes to War, p. 180-287-90

For Wed, 2/6

• reaction paper #2 due: Casablanca is one of the most popular movies of all time. How do the filmmakers weave together a love story with issues that would have resonated with the audience in 1942? (more of a free write than directed paper)
  
• read: blog notes on •Blog notes on Why We Fight
• Frank Capra (on reserve)
• Hollywood Goes to War, p.122-25

Yankee Doodle Dandy reading for Mon, 1/28

YANKEE DOODLE DANDY

• Yankee Doodle Dandy was a huge hit in 1942 and swept many awards.
• A patriotic salute to George M. Cohan, the Great Irish American songwriter and showman. He wrote It’s a Grand Old Flag, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Over There, and many other big hits.
• Cohan was allegedly born on the fourth of July. James Cagney portrays him brilliantly in this film.
• FDR is portrayed in the beginning and the end.
• When the film was released, the war was going badly. Once again, 1917 is evoked with its implication of victory in the future. The implication is that 1917 was good (not bad), but that we failed to finish the job “over there.” This time when Cagney sings “Over There,” the implication is that “we won’t come back til it’s over over there.”
• Nostalgia, patriotism, morale-boosting, corny…but very powerful. Why?
• After September 11, John Travolta reflected on his longtime love affair with Yankee Doodle Dandy. Thought it would interest you…
  

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November 30, 2001, Friday
MOVIES, PERFORMING ARTS/WEEKEND DESK

WATCHING MOVIES WITH/John Travolta; You Never Get Over Yankee Doodle Fever (NEW YORK TIMES)

By RICK LYMAN

LOS ANGELES -- JOHN TRAVOLTA sat quietly in a square, well-cushioned chair along the back wall of his home screening room. He had just finished watching ''Yankee Doodle Dandy,'' a glossy Warner Brothers bio-pic about the legendary George M. Cohan, a movie that's been dear to him since he was a little boy in New Jersey dreaming about a life on the stage. Mr. Travolta rubbed his eyes as the screening room door swung open and his wife, Kelly Preston, arrived with their 18-month-old daughter, Ella Bleu, on her hip.
''Someone wants to say goodnight,'' Ms. Preston said, to which Mr. Travolta offered a broad, brave smile. But she was not fooled, squinting instead into her husband's red eyes. ''Have you been crying?'' she asked.

Yes, he had been crying; there was no use denying it. He nodded sheepishly. The movie that had meant so much to him as a boy, he discovered, still had the power to reach into his heart. And now, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, what had once seemed corny, flag-waving jingoism in the screen saga of the man who wrote youre a Grand Old Flag'' and ''Over There'' instead came across as almost eerily in touch with the current national mood.

How often does a movie really evoke that level of emotion, you know?&; Mr. Travolta said, taking a deep, steadying breath. ''And continually, throughout the piece, unabashedly so. I just love it. It's the bomb. Especially at this time, especially now. There were a couple of moments, especially toward the end of the movie, where it really reflected the kinds of emotions I'm feeling about the current situation. I mean, you could sing that song, 'Over There,' and it would still hold up. It sounds like it could have been written today, doesn't it? It's eerie.''

Mr. Travolta turned in his seat, raised his arms like a tenor in an opera house and began singing softly: ''Over there! Over there! Send the word, send the word, over there!'' He rose from his seat in the dark room and began to sing louder and with more emotion. ''That the Yanks are coming! The Yanks are coming! They're drum, drum, drumming everywhere!''

A wide-screen smile slowly spread across his face. ''Can you imagine if I had done that when I was on the Jay Leno show, just stood up and started singing that song?; he said, referring to his appearance in late September. It would have created such a moment. Wouldn't that have been something? Wow. Because I think this attack on Sept. 11 -- and I want to choose my words very carefully -- this attack was on the intellectual center of our nation, on New York, which has never been attacked. So it has brought everyone together, finally, in this zone, made everyone a little more patriotic.''

Mr. Travolta, 47, lives on a tree-filled, Mediterranean-style hillside estate on the West Side of Los Angeles, a guardhouse at his gate and a line of beautifully restored cars lining the sloping drive. Inside, his home is filled with pictures, many of him -- as a boy, as a young man in the mid-1970's television series ;Welcome Back, Kotter,'' during his first wave of film success after the release of ''Saturday Night Fever'' (1977), and then later, after his comeback with ''Pulp Fiction'' (1994), when he became a bigger star than ever. There are also plenty of pictures of Ms. Preston, Ella and their 9-year-old son, Jett.

In display alcoves in the screening room, and just down the hall near the dining room, are pictures of some of the dinner party guests who have been at the house. They cluster together inside their shining frames, well fed and beaming happily: Tom Hanks, Marlon Brando, Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman and a dozen others.

Patriotic Spirit

''I really had a hard time choosing between which of three films to watch,'' Mr. Travolta said before the screening as he made his way down the hall into what appeared to be a library. The three movies that have had the greatest impact on him, he decided, were Claude Lelouch's 1966 film ''A Man and a Woman,'' Bertrand Blier's ''Going Places,'' from 1974, and ''Yankee Doodle Dandy.'' But he settled on that one, Michael Curtiz's 1942 musical, because of the way it resonates through his life.

'' 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' was my favorite film as a boy, and I want to see if it still holds up for me,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''I happened to see one short section of it a while ago, while flipping through the channels one night, and it still touched a chord with me. As an adult, I was leaning more toward Lelouch and Blier. But then I thought, no, overall this was such an inspiration to me through my whole life and career that it was just the most valid choice.''

Mr. Travolta said he was 5 when he first saw ''Yankee Doodle Dandy'' in 1959. To him, then and now, the heart of the film was the central performance of James Cagney as the cocky, cantering George M. Cohan. (Cagney won his only Oscar for the role, one of three the film won out of eight nominations.)

''They had what they called the 'Million-Dollar Movie' on television in New York at the time,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''They would show the same movie, every day, for a whole week. And it was during one of those weeks that I saw 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' for the first time.''

He was immediately entranced, he said, watching the film several times that first week alone. In subsequent years, Mr. Travolta said, he has seen it at least 30 times.

''It was Cagney, really,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''He just really appealed to me, for the positiveness of his personality and his charisma and the way he made me feel that, with work, I could do the things he was doing in the movie. I guess I was attracted to his spirit, but also the story, because it was about a show-biz family, which is what I am from. His family in the movie reminded me a little bit of my own family, so I identified with that. In my family, we were all actors, singers, dancers. And there was something about the patriotism in the movie that struck me as a child. Jimmy Cagney made you feel patriotic in that movie. So it's the right kind of movie to watch just now, actually. I get chills just thinking about it.''

A Hoofer, Too, Wiseguy

''Are we ready?'' he asked. Then he clicked a button on the table beside him, and with a faintly audible whir, shades slowly drew across the room's tall windows, closing off the last of a magenta sunset. A screen emerged from the ceiling on the far wall, slowly covering a bookcase and flashing to brilliance with the old black-and-white Warner Brothers shield logo.

''Cagney was 42 years old when he did this movie, and it was absolutely a departure for him,'' Mr. Travolta said. Although Cagney had appeared in musicals before, most notably ''Footlight Parade'' (1933), working with the choreographer Busby Berkeley, and had begun his career as a vaudeville hoofer in the 1920's, by 1942 he was firmly entrenched in the public mind as the swaggering gangster antihero of hits like ''Public Enemy'' (1931) and ''Angels With Dirty Faces'' (1938). The sense of menace that Cagney conveyed with his coiled-spring posture and the distinctive cadence of his rapid patter made him one of the most imitated and iconic performers of the prewar years.

''So many actors in our profession keep it a secret that they sing and dance,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''It's not that they want to keep it secret -- more that they don't get a chance to do it. But here Cagney was a hoofer and a vaudevillian, and he was desperate to show that he could do this other stuff.''

Mr. Travolta said he heard stories about the making of ''Yankee Doodle Dandy'' from Cagney himself, whom he befriended in the last years of the actor's life. In 1980, when Mr. Travolta was starring in ''Urban Cowboy,'' he arranged through an intermediary at one of the studios for an introduction to the reclusive Cagney, retired from the screen since 1961 and living on a farm in upstate New York.

''I know he was born in 1899, so he was 81 years old when I met him,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''I went up to a house he had here at the time, up in Benedict Canyon -- this was in addition to his farm in New York -- and he was just sitting there in a chair. I sat down and held his hand and I said, 'I just wanted to tell you how much I love you and how much you meant to me,' and I started to cry. And he, being Irish, started to cry, too. And so we just sat there and cried about my love for him.''

Mr. Travolta broke into a fresh laugh of delight.

'A Modest Guy'

''I told him how he became this figure in my childhood, because I loved his movies, and because my mother, when she wanted to get me to do something, would tell me that Jimmy Cagney was on the phone and he said I should do it,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''You know, she'd say, 'Jimmy Cagney says to clean your room.' And I was so afraid that maybe he was on the phone because, you know, my mother was an actress and it was plausible to me that maybe she knew him. 'Jimmy Cagney says, ''Brush your teeth,'' and I'd run to brush my teeth. Anyway, I told him this story and he was very touched, so we struck up this relationship, and I guess I saw him three or four times a year until he died in 1986.

''He was a modest guy. He really was. He didn't like braggadocio. He played all these characters who were cocky and bragging, but he didn't like that in other people. So you had to be careful around him. If you said anything that even slightly seemed to be complimenting yourself, he would call you on it.''

On the screen Cohan is basking in an ovation from the footlights on a Broadway stage, the curtain sliding down as he smiles and bows. In his dressing room, he receives a message that President Franklin D. Roosevelt wants to see him in the White House, immediately. And it is there, in a late night tête-à-tête with the bespectacled president, that Cohan recounts his life on the stage in flashback.

What is most apparent in the opening minutes of the film, and sporadically throughout it, is the weird similarity between the national mood depicted on the screen and the one that the country is now experiencing in the weeks since Sept. 11. ''Yankee Doodle Dandy'' was released in the months after Pearl Harbor as America was stirring itself to patriotic fervor and preparing for war with Japan and Germany. At the time, Cohan was a half-forgotten figure, a composer and a performer who had made his name on the stage in the last years of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th, but whose sentimental style had long since been subsumed in a tidal wave of jazz. But suddenly, the flag-waving author of ''Over There'' found his outdated sentiments back in vogue.

In one montage sequence in the middle of the film -- just after the Lusitania has been sunk by a German submarine, drawing the United States into World War I -- Cohan speaks over images of newspaper headlines, sidewalk crowds, marching bands and Army recruiting depots. ''It always happens,'' Cohan says. ''Whenever we get too high hat, too sophisticated for flag-waving, some thug nation decides we're a pushover, all ready to be blackjacked. And it isn't long before we're looking up mighty anxiously to be sure the flag is still waving above us.''

Mr. Travolta raised his hands to his cheeks in astonishment. ''Did you hear that?'' he said. ''That could have been written today.''

Born in a Trunk

Once Cohan begins to tell his life story and the film moves back to the 19th century, Mr. Travolta becomes even more embroiled in the drama. A first scene shows an old provincial theater where Cohan's father, played by Walter Huston, has just finished an afternoon performance. ''This is exactly the kind of show they would have been putting on back then in a theater like this,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''Look at the gaslights. Look how huge this set is. They really did this right, didn't they? And the movie, it already has an emotional quality to it, don't you think? Very rich.''

Part of the appeal of the film to the 5-year-old John Travolta -- especially in these early scenes, when young George joins the family act and has his first success in a national tour of ''Peck's Bad Boy'' -- was to imagine himself in the role, going out on the road as a pre-teen performer.

''Oh God, yes,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''My parents let me start performing when I was 7, so it was about two years after I saw this movie for the first time. I remember they were doing a lot of productions of 'Gypsy' around that time, and I wanted to audition for it and go on the road so much. Whatever was going on in showbiz, I wanted to be a part of it.''

Mr. Travolta's mother, Helen, had been an actress and a singer on the radio with a group called the Sunshine Sisters and was a drama teacher in suburban New Jersey when John was growing up. His father, Salvatore, had been a semipro football player but was a co-owner of a tire store in John's youth. Both of John's brothers and two of his three sisters also pursued careers in acting, dancing and singing.

Cohan quickly grows into a teenage member of his family troupe, now known as the Four Cohans, with his father, mother and sister, Josie (played by the actor's own sister, Jeanne Cagney). Cohan is portrayed by Cagney as brash and brilliant, endearingly cocksure. When a blustering theater owner insults Cohan's bride-to-be, a hopeful young singer, Cohan responds with a kick in the pants that turns into a big, slapstick gag: the manager crashes through a curtain, upsets some workmen and causes a whole cascade of objects to crash to the ground around him.

''Today, they wouldn't know how to do a scene like that,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''I'm sure it's a simple thing, written in the script, but they came up with this elaborate way of doing it, as a big stunt. Today, they wouldn't trust it enough. The point is that Cagney and the director know that at this point, the audience really wanted to see this guy get his just desserts because he'd hurt Mary's feelings. So they wanted to get the bad guy and knew that the emotion would be big enough so that it was worth doing as a big stunt. And they also knew that the only way they could do it, with the kind of naïve approach that the story required, was to have Cohan kick the guy in the butt and then let the comedy of the slapstick do the work. Today, I'm afraid, filmmakers wouldn't be so clever about it.''

Stage Presence

The director, the Hungarian-born Michael Curtiz, was one of Warner Brothers' prime workhorses in the 1930's and 40's, usually given the best material and the studio's top stars. A short list of some of the enduring films he made in those years would include ''Cabin in the Cotton'' with Bette Davis (1932), ''Captain Blood'' with Errol Flynn (1935), ''Four Daughters'' with John Garfield (1938), ''The Sea Wolf'' with Edward G. Robinson (1941) and, of course, the jewel in the studio's crown, ''Casablanca'' in 1942.

Mr. Travolta, however, is drawn to ''Yankee Doodle Dandy'' less for its directorial flourishes -- which, frankly, can seem more than a little clunky today, it being at heart a fairly formulaic and sentimental bio-pic -- than he is to the figure at the film's center, Cagney.

''He was an original, totally distinctive,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''It was something about his confidence. He had that in every role. He never seemed to do anything uncertain. I remember, a few years ago, Tom Hanks said to me, 'Where do you get your confidence from?' He was talking about how I would take on so many different types of roles, unabashedly. So I understand that feeling of confidence. It's very appealing.''

As Cohan begins his composing career, the movie becomes essentially a kind of greatest-hits parade, showing no doubt highly fictionalized versions of how Cohan came to write ''Harrigan,'' ''Yankee Doodle Dandy,'' ''Give My Regards to Broadway,'' ''Mary,'' ''45 Minutes From Broadway'' and others. And there are two grand-scale set pieces in which Cagney gets a chance to sing and dance onstage, show-within-a-show scenes from two of Cohan's biggest stage successes.

When Cagney, dressed as a jockey about to run in the English Derby, breaks into ''Yankee Doodle Dandy,'' Mr. Travolta is transported.

'It's Magic'

''It's delightful to hear him sing it,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''It's magic.'' The actor's eyes begin to swell with tears, and his voice grows husky. He holds his fist against his clenched lips as he watches Cagney go into his first big dance number, a stiff-jointed, hip-pivoting, tap-clattering burst of energy that makes the thick-torsoed and short-legged Cagney bounce like a pinball around the stage, a fireplug that's come to life with infectious physical athleticism.

''How great is that?'' Mr. Travolta said between sharp intakes of breath. ''It's so classic.'' He cleared his throat, wiped his eyes, took a few seconds to compose himself.

In some ways, he said, Cagney's idiosyncratic dancing style is appealing in a way that's inexplicable, like much art. Certainly, Mr. Travolta said, the classically trained dancers of the day, or the more graceful screen dancers like Fred Astaire, probably did not consider Cagney's frenetic jittering to be true, accomplished dancing. But there is something about the bravado, the showing off, that makes it so pleasurable. A dancer like Astaire was always trying to do impossible things, to wow the audience with his unreachable gifts, Mr. Travolta said. But in ''Yankee Doodle Dandy,'' Cagney always seemed more reachable.

''One just entertained you and the other, Cagney, inspired you to want to do it,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''At least, it did me. It is so magnetic, so powerful and magical and spiritual. In some ways, it was very simplistic. But it was the sort of thing that you could get up and try to imitate it. It seemed accessible. Actually, believe it or not, that was the key to the success of 'Saturday Night Fever.' Because everybody who came out of the movie thought, 'Hey, I can do that kind of dancing.' That's the gift. Just like Cagney gave us in this movie. We were able to inspire people to get up and dance again.''

In a later scene, Cohan's parents and sister are at a small, provincial railroad station when they receive a telegram from George, now a big success on Broadway. He is offering them jobs.

Timing Is Everything

''That scene looks hokey, but it's really not,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''Things like that really happen to people in show business. I've had scenes like that in my life, you know, where you get cast for something or get a job in summer stock and it happens just like that. The call comes and you get your mother on the phone and say, 'Mom, I just got cast in this movie,' and she yells out for your father, 'Dad, come here, John's going out to L.A.' It seems hokey, but it really does happen.''

The scene in which Cohan lets his future wife (Joan Leslie) hear the song he has written for her, ''Mary,'' made Mr. Travolta particularly aware of Cagney's acting choices. ''It's great how he's mixing the tea in the background while he talks to her and while she's playing the song for the first time,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''It gives him something to play against while he's doing the scene. He's talking to her, but he's also fussing with the tea. It wouldn't have been nearly as interesting if he was just standing behind her while she played the piano. Oh, and now, look: he's going to take his first sip of tea at precisely the right moment. There's a pause in the music. A close-up. And there he goes. Wow. The timing, it's fabulous.''

Mr. Travolta is convinced from the performances in the film -- particularly from Cagney, Huston and Leslie -- that the actors knew they were working on a film that would be good. ''You can tell that they just knew it,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''There's an energy that actors get when they have good material, and you can feel it in this movie. I've had the good fortune, several times in my career, where I could feel it. 'Pulp Fiction.' 'Primary Colors.' 'Civil Action.' You just know you've got the words. They're in your pocket, and this movie has that kind of energy, where they knew they were making something good.''

Out of the Spotlight

At the height of his career, Cohan owned a string of theaters, had several shows running at once and saw his ''Over There'' become the anthem for America's involvement in World War I. But after the war, as the movie tells it, Cohan kept writing the sweeter stuff that was popular before the war and found himself out of step with the Roaring 20's. So when Cohan's father dies -- a wrenching scene that also brought tears from Mr. Travolta (''I have a story to tell you about Cagney after this, but if I try to tell you now I'll start crying again'') -- Cohan decided to travel the world and then retire to a remote farm, where he gradually sank into obscurity.

''It's funny, you know, but I never really thought about it,'' Mr. Travolta said. ''This is exactly what Cagney did. He retired when he was only 62 years old and lived most of the rest of his life on a farm, staying out of the spotlight. It's almost like he was doing the Cohan thing all over again. You never really know how much art influences people and their personalities, the roles they play. This certainly was the highlight of his career. I wonder. You know, that story I was going to tell you about Cagney? Well, you know the scene where Cohan is at his dying father's bedside? I had a scene just like that with Cagney.''

Balancing the Emotion

Mr. Travolta's voice began to falter again. ''He was in bed and he had his leg amputated because he had diabetes, and I sat by his side. It was almost exactly like the scene in the movie. This is something very few people know. I snuck into the hospital where he was in upstate New York. It was so hard to see him with his leg gone. I just stood by his bed. He tried to make out like he had a lot of energy and was going to rise above it, but it was in the next few days that he died.''

Mr. Travolta was weeping now, tears pouring down both cheeks. ''It was so obvious when Cagney was smiling at his father during that scene that he was just trying to be cheery for his dad. And that is what was so great. He balances the emotion. So that when it releases at the end of the scene, when he breaks down in tears, it pays off. Very smart. Very smart acting. And then the kiss on the forehead at the end. Just brilliant. I mean, how memorable is that? I'll tell you what it is. It's perfect.''

Announcements for Week 3 (Jan 28-30)

For Monday, 1/28:
–Bring 2 unmarked bluebooks to class
–Read: Great Power Diplomacy (on reserve in library), Notes on Yankee Doodle Dandy (course blog)
**change in syllabus: No March of Time or Ramparts We Watch readings

For Wednesday:
–Reaction paper #1 due (2 pages minimum): Discuss themes, images, music used in Yankee Doodle Dandy that are meant to bolster American support for World War II. Is it an effective piece of propaganda?
–Read: Roosevelt & Hitler (on reserve in library)

Reading Assignment for Wed, 1/16

For Wed, 1/16, please read History Goes to the Movies, Introduction and Chapters 1 & 7. Come to class prepared to discuss.

Welcome to IDST 2500!

Every week I will post notes about the film we are viewing. Please read these BEFORE class in order to promote discussion and understanding of the film's content, intent, and other pertinent information.