Trivia for
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) More at IMDbPro »

• Fred Astaire was first offered the leading role but turned it down.
  
  
• James Cagney reprised his role as George M. Cohan in The Seven Little Foys (1955).
  
  
• George M. Cohan chose James Cagney to play him.
  
  
• This was the very first black and white movie to be colorized using a controversial computer-applied process. Despite widespread opposition to the practice by many film aficionados, stars and directors, the movie won over a sizeable section of the public on its re-release.
  
  
• Many facts were changed or ignored to add to the feel of the movie. For example, the real George M. Cohan was married twice, and although his second wife's middle name was Mary, she went by her first name, Agnes.
  
  
• The movie deviated so far from the truth that, following the premiere, George M. Cohan commented, "It was a good movie. Who was it about?"
  
  
• James Cagney was eleven years older than his screen mother Rosemary DeCamp.
  
  
• Frances Langford is listed in the credits simply as "Singer". In the film, Cagney calls her "Nora", so this character is probably the real-life Nora Bayes (1880-1928). Bayes was a popular performer who recorded many Cohan songs and entertained the troops with Cohan during World War I. Bayes wrote the song "Shine on Harvest Moon" and was the subject of the Warner Brothers biopic Shine on Harvest Moon (1944). In "Yankee Doodle Dandy", Langford also sings the medley "In a Kingdom of Our Own" / "Love Nest" / "Nellie Kelly, I Love You" / "The Man Who Owns Broadway" / "Molly Malone"/ "Billie" that backs up one of Don Siegel's great montage sequences. Langford sang "Over There" to WW I American troops and toured with Bob Hope to entertain American troops in WW II, Korea and Viet Nam.
  
  
• Warner Bros.' second highest-grossing film of 1942 ($4.8 million).
  
  
• James Cagney's performance as George M. Cohan is ranked #6 on Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Performances of All Time.
  
  
• The movie's line "My mother thanks you. My father thanks you. My sister thanks you. And I thank you." was voted as the #97 movie quote by the American Film Institute (out of 100).
  
  
• In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #98 Greatest Movie of All Time.
  
  
• According to James Cagney's autobiography his brother William Cagney (who was also his manager) actively pursued the role of ultra-patriotic George M. Cohan for James as a way of removing the taint of James' political activities in the 1930s, when he was a strong, somewhat radical supporter of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When Cohan himself learned about Cagney's background as a song-and-dance man in vaudeville, he approved him for the project.
  
  
• James Cagney broke a rib while filming a dance scene, but continued dancing until it was completed.
  
  
• Carl Jules Weyl's theater stage set took up a whole sound stage and was specifically constructed so that it could replicate the proscenium design of any given theater, from the traditional, 19th century stylings of the Liberty (now Madame Tusseud's Wax Museum, where "Little Johnny Jones" opened in 1904) and Herald Square (demolished in 1915, where "George Washington Junior" opened in 1906) Theaters, to the Art Deco design of the Alvin (now the Neil Simon, where "I'd Rather Be Right" opened in 1937) Theater.
  
  
• In One, Two, Three (1961) James Cagney plays C.R. McNamara, the head of Coca Cola's operations in Germany. At one point, to cause problems for Otto Piffl (Horst Buchholz), Jimmy Cagney gives him a cuckoo clock that plays "Yankee Doodle Dandy" causing Buchholz to get arrested by the East Germany police. Jimmy Cagney played the lead role in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), the story of George M. Cohan, the composer of "Yankee Doodle Dandy."
  
  
• Walking down the stairs at the White House, James Cagney goes into a tap dance. According to TCM, that was completely ad-libbed.
  
  

Related Links