A.M. Willard's "Yankee Doodle" is a famous painting of a drum-and-fife trio, also known as "The Spirit of '76". This AM&B short, shot by G.W. "Billy" Bitzer -- the G.W. stood for Gottfried Wilhelm, not George Washington -- is one of those movies meant to convert a famous painting into a movie.
It was a genre that didn't take, although it remains in the DNA of the cinema; Ridley Scott's 2007 "American Gangster" reworks a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover for a dinner shot. However, the essence of a motion picture is motion and it's hard to extend a moment into even a one-minute film like this. Once you stop cheering for the patriotic fervor of the work, you've used up everything in the picture, even on today, the Fourth of July.