Watching Yankee Doodle Dandy again, and watching it this time beside someone who had never seen it, I found myself in the familiar difficulty of trying to explain a greatness that seems obvious while it is occurring and yet becomes strangely elusive the moment one tries to account for it. It is easy enough to say that James Cagney is magnificent, that the songs are everlasting, that Michael Curtiz paces the picture with extraordinary command, and that the film’s patriotic ardor has a freshness and warmth almost impossible to reproduce today. All this is true, but it does not quite reach the matter at hand. The greatness of Yankee Doodle Dandy is not merely that it contains excellent acting, music, pacing, and craft, though it contains all of them in abundance. Its greatness is that it belongs to a condition of art in which such elements could still cohere without embarrassment. It belongs to the period before suspicion had settled over the medium of film as a dominant force.
By suspicion I do not mean intelligence, nor analysis. One must be careful on this point, because nothing is gained by pretending that the older masters were naïve craftsmen who somehow made better pictures by thinking less. Curtiz was no innocent, nor were Cagney, the Warner apparatus, the writers, designers, editors, musicians, choreographers, and technicians whose labor gives the film its remarkable propulsion. Classical Hollywood, at its best, was not thoughtless; indeed, it may have been more exacting in its practical intelligence than later cinema, which often mistakes conceptual density for form. But there is a difference between thoughtfulness and suspicion, between artifice and falseness. Yankee Doodle Dandy is full of artifice, but it is not false. It is about performance, but it is not performing its own aboutness. It contains theater, but it does not turn theater into an object of commentary. It simply gives us Cohan’s world of stage, family, and country as if it were still available to be loved.
This is why the film is not merely about America, and not merely patriotic in the ordinary sense. In a peculiar and perhaps now almost inaccessible way, it is America. Not the whole of America, and not America as political science, sociology, crime, misery, contradiction, or ideology would define it, but America as public energy, as rhythm, as (family) enterprise, as popular song, as train stations and dressing rooms, as gratitude to fathers and mothers, as sentiment unashamed of itself, as patriotism made visible through theatrical form. One may protest that this America is partial, brightened, simplified, and mythic. Certainly. But myth is not falsehood. It is one of the means by which a people sees what it loves, and the question for art is not whether the myth contains the whole historical record, for no myth can, but whether the image it offers has moral and imaginative truth. Yankee Doodle Dandy has that truth in abundance because it does not treat American theatricality as a mask to be torn away. It treats theatricality as one of the natural forms by which a people gives itself visible expression.
That public soul is embodied, above all, in Cagney. Orson Welles famously stated in a 1974 interview, “Cagney, in my view, was maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of a camera.” Nothing more need be said on this colossus, and yet one is obliged to say something, because his performance is not merely great acting but a kind of argument in motion. Modern film culture often speaks of acting as if its highest form were inwardness, hesitation, psychological fracture, the half-swallowed phrase, the private wound reluctantly disclosed. There is truth in that tradition, and one need not deny Brando, Clift, Dean, or any of the great actors following in order to see what has been lost. But Cagney belongs to an older and in some respects higher understanding of performance, in which the body itself has been trained into theatrical intelligence. His walk, his comic snap, his sudden softness, and the way he dances as though movement were the natural outpouring of character reveal a man whose inward life is carried through the body. Cagney does not merely interpret Cohan; he makes Cohan audible before he sings a note.
This is one reason the theatrical scenes in the film are not interruptions. In lesser musical biographies, the story stops for the numbers, or the numbers arrive as decorative confirmations of what the story has already told us. In Yankee Doodle Dandy, the stage and the life are not competing planes, but rather the same current under different lights. The Cohan family act, the Broadway triumphs, the patriotic spectacles, and the private scenes of ambition, courtship, sorrow, and gratitude belong to a single narrative. The film’s transitions from backstage to public performance and from personal striving to national ceremony are so graceful because the film does not imagine that art and life are opposites. The theater is not an escape from reality; it is the form reality takes when a certain kind of energetic Americanism is raised to its most complete expression. Cohan does not enter the theater in order to become artificial. He enters it in order to become himself.
The theater of classical Hollywood was not merely the literal stage preserved within the new art of motion pictures, though Yankee Doodle Dandy has that in overflowing measure. It was also the inheritance of theatrical discipline within film itself: projection, rhetoric, gesture, diction, ensemble, timing, emotion, and a willingness to let characters stand for something larger than their interior distresses. Classical Hollywood did not fear these things, because it had not yet learned to confuse largeness with falsity. The old actors had come from stage, vaudeville, radio, dance, opera, revue, and popular entertainment; the old directors worked inside genres and houses; the old studios gathered entire worlds of craft under one roof. Film, in that period, had not severed itself from the older arts. It remembered theater, song, dance, painting, costume, architecture, music, and literature—and it could absorb them without anxiety.
That absorption depended in no small part on the studio system, and on what is sometimes called house style. The phrase may sound commercial, but it names something profound. Film is not a solitary art in the way a lyric poem, a sonata, or a canvas may be solitary. It is made by a mass of people, directly and indirectly, across various departments, all contributing to the final object. The genius of classical Hollywood was that this apparatus did not always flatten style; at its best, it refined and enlarged it. MGM had grandeur, polish, and a certain ceremonial brightness; RKO could give darkness, elegance, eccentricity, and shadow; Warner Bros. had speed, pressure, urban appetite, and a moral punch; Paramount had sophistication and glamour; Fox had its own glow of Americana and spectacle. These are broad descriptions, naturally, but they point to a truth now difficult to imagine: the house itself could have a style, and the individual artist could speak within it without needing to pretend that the whole film was the emanation of his private soul.
This is not an argument against directors having voices. Ford, Hawks, Curtiz, Wyler, Capra, Lubitsch, Walsh, Cukor, Stevens, Fleming, and others plainly had voices. Yet there is a difference between a voice and a signature, and a difference still greater between a master craftsman inside an inherited apparatus and a director who understands the film chiefly as the projection of his own total conception. The later auteur cinema, without question, produced masterpieces. Kubrick may be the greatest auteur director of the twentieth century, and 2001: A Space Odyssey may be among the supreme achievements of the medium. But no one could mistake Kubrick’s expanse for classical innocence. His films are conceived, designed, controlled, distanced, architectonic, analytical, and metaphysical; they are the works of a mind that has turned cinema into an instrument of total inquiry. The result can be magnificent. It can also be cold, or at least post-classical in some sense.
The contrast becomes sharper if The Godfather is added to the comparison, not because it is a work conveniently set up for dismissal, but because, like 2001, its greatness is scarcely in dispute; these are works of high cinema by any serious measure, both critically and in the popular mind. The length of production itself tells part of the story. Yankee Doodle Dandy moved from the beginning of production to its New York premiere in roughly six months; The Godfather, still made with considerable economy by later standards, took about a year from shooting to release; 2001, by contrast, occupied Kubrick and Clarke from their first collaboration in 1964 to its premiere in 1968, and from the beginning of filming alone consumed more than two years. The point is not that speed proves artistic superiority, but that the old studio picture belonged to an apparatus in which economic pressure, departmental discipline, and craft forced decisions into form before they could harden into analysis. The later auteur film, by contrast, increasingly became an extended act of conception, control, and self-conscious design.
The Godfather offers the more instructive complication, because it is a great film and, in many respects, a film that still remembers classical Hollywood. It has patience, ritual, darkness, family structure, narrative weight, and visual gravity; it inherits the gangster picture, the immigrant melodrama, noir, opera, religious imagery, and the slow ceremonial authority of older forms. Yet one senses throughout that Francis Ford Coppola is making it. That is not a defect; indeed, it is part of the film’s grandeur. But it is a different order of grandeur from Yankee Doodle Dandy. The Godfather broods over America. Yankee Doodle Dandy performs America. The former knows that America is corruptible, theatrical, violent, familial, religious, capitalist, and tragic, and it arranges these meanings with extraordinary deliberation. The latter does not brood over its inheritance; it inhabits it. One is late greatness, heavy with knowledge. The other is central greatness, radiant with inevitability.
It is this inevitability that I find so moving. The film has no need to prove that patriotism can be noble, that fathers may be honored sans irony, or that gratitude to country and family may be expressed without embarrassment. These things have not yet been summoned before the tribunal of suspicion. This does not mean that the world of 1942 was innocent in the childish sense, or that the film was made outside history. It was made in wartime, by an industry fully aware of audiences, economic concerns, morale, censorship, politics, and publicity. But it was made before the reigning habits of artistic seriousness required the artist to undermine his own materials in order to appear intelligent or sophisticated.
The decline from that condition was not immediate, nor was it simple. The 1950s still produced greatness of the highest order, and the 1960s and 1970s produced films no honest person could dismiss. But somewhere in that mid-century passage the atmosphere changed. The studio system weakened; the star system altered; television reorganized attention; the old censorship regime collapsed; the director became increasingly exalted as the author of the film; the university and the critic gained a new kind of interpretive authority; inherited Christianity lost public command; the sexual revolution, birth control, Vietnam, rock culture, therapeutic selfhood, and intensified institutional suspicion all entered the air; and art, which had once drawn from common ceremonies and common expectations, increasingly came to understand those inheritances as problems. Again, this did not make greatness impossible. It made a certain kind of greatness less natural.
The same broad movement occurred in music, though on a different timetable and by different means. It is one of the suggestive facts of modern culture that film and orchestral music seem to reach, or at least to pass through, their highest public fertility in neighboring historical territory. Orchestral music, in its great central tradition, remained the work of individual genius; but that genius breathed a common air, drawing from church, song, dance, folk inheritance, theater, and national life, and shaping them into forms large enough to carry a civilization’s inner life. Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Strauss, Nielsen, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, Bartók, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Hindemith, and Shostakovich did not all believe the same things, nor write in the same language, but they still worked in relation to a central inheritance whose authority remained audible. Afterward, important composers continued to appear, and some of them wrote music of great beauty, power, and seriousness. But the center no longer held in the same way. The symphony, the tone poem, the concerto, the opera, the large sacred work, and the public orchestral utterance survived, but they no longer occupied the same civilizational middle; the line continued, but it fractured.
The point is not that later artists were less gifted, any more than later directors were less skilled. The point is that art forms have periods when craft, social function, institutional support, inherited language, audience expectation, and moral confidence align, and when they do, the form becomes maximally fertile. Then, after a certain point, technique may advance while cultural authority recedes. The works may become more complex, more personal, more specialized, more radical, more brilliant in isolated ways, and yet less central. The older public language becomes suspect, and the artist, even the great artist, must either defend it, dismantle it, parody it, flee from it, or reconstruct it in private. Personality can make art distinctive, but inheritance makes it large.
This is where religion enters the matter, not as an imposed subject upon Yankee Doodle Dandy, which is not a religious film in any doctrinal sense, but as part of the moral atmosphere from which such a film could arise. The public culture that made the film legible was still of Christianity: filial piety, gratitude, vocation, ordered liberty, sacrifice, the dignity of work, the moral elevation of domestic loyalty, the possibility that joy may be innocent, and the belief that ceremony need not be manipulation. A film need not quote Scripture to depend upon a Christian inheritance, just as a symphony need not be liturgical to carry within it memories of church. In Yankee Doodle Dandy, that inheritance is not preached. It is assumed.
Such art is harder to obtain than solemnity. It is much easier for art to announce its seriousness than to become serious through motion, proportion, and confidence. Yankee Doodle Dandy does not announce itself as a great film about America, theatricality, public art, fathers, sons, patriotism, and the moral value of performance. It simply becomes that film by doing what it does with conviction. It stages the thing. It sings it, dances it, cuts it, frames it, jokes it, mourns it, salutes it, and sends it marching down the stairs with Cagney’s feet striking out one of the most beautiful rhythms in American cinema.
Perhaps that is the final distinction between pre-suspicious art and the art that follows it. The former does not lack knowledge; its knowledge remains capable of love. It can accept artifice without assuming falseness, patriotism without embarrassment, and popularity without contempt. Later art often knows more in one sense and trusts less in another. The later artist may still make great things, but he does so after unembarrassed confidence has ceased to be available to him. The old confidence, once lost, cannot be recovered by quotation alone.
This is why Yankee Doodle Dandy matters beyond nostalgia. One does not return to it merely to admire a charming patriotic relic, nor even to watch Cagney perform one of the great acts of screen incarnation. One returns to it because it preserves an artistic condition in which film still remembered theater, theater still remembered public ceremony, music still remembered song and march, and America could still be imagined as something to be performed without shame. It is not the whole truth of the country. But it is a truth, and a great one: the truth of a civilization still able, for a moment, to stand upright in public and sing.