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Tuesday, July 4th | 12 Movies

There’s no more American holiday than Independence Day, and for this year’s 4th of July, TCM celebrates a full day of all things American – or at least those settings, values and symbols that classic Hollywood held up as national ideals. Expect a big patriotic dose of small town life, the nuclear family, baseball, vaudeville, marching bands and barn raisings, much of it set to the tunes of such great American composers as John Philip Sousa, Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, George M. Cohan and…Nicholas Brodszky? 

Never heard of Nicholas Brodszky? He’s the Odessa-born, Vienna-trained composer who made it big in the Great Melting Pot with screen songs for the likes of Doris Day, June Allyson, Mario Lanza and, in Small Town Girl (1953), Jane Powell. As the eponymous heroine, Powell introduces snobbish New York playboy Farley Granger to the simple joys of life in little Duck Creek, USA. The two fall in love, freeing her hometown beau to pursue his true passion, a Broadway dance career (hmmm…). As the “jilted” boyfriend, Bobby Van is put through grueling paces by notoriously demanding choreographer Busby Berkeley, literally hopping through town in a three-minute tracking shot with only four cuts. Merriment and shin splints ensue.

Berkeley is back, creating his signature over-the-top set pieces for Esther Williams in Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), a musical biopic of swimming champion Annette Kellerman, who scandalously popularized the one-piece bathing suit in the early 20th century. Kellerman was Australian, but she achieved show business fame in the U.S. in vaudeville, Broadway and silent pictures. The movie focuses on her early success as the star of a water ballet at New York’s Hippodrome, thanks to the promotion of her manager and future husband, a prototypical American hustler portrayed by Victor Mature.

Show business – as in “there’s no business like” it in the estimation of Tin Pan Alley songwriter Irving Berlin – bursts forth in all its colorful, tuneful glory in Annie Get Your Gun (1950), another highly fictional biopic of a woman who parlays her sporting skills into a legendary entertainment career. Betty Hutton (replacing an ailing and dismissed Judy Garland) stars as sharpshooter Annie Oakley, tracing her rise from backwoods Ohio to starring in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the late 19th century. If you still need to be convinced of its rightful inclusion in the Independence Day line-up, refer to a 1978 New York Times review of a stage production that described it as “a marvelously American type of show to pop up at the Fourth of July.”

A range of American music periods and styles are showcased in the next five movies in the day’s program. Composer Gene de Paul and lyricist Johnny Mercer sought to capture the rough-and-tumble 1850s rural Oregon setting of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) with songs like “Bless Your Beautiful Hide,” “Goin’ Courtin’,” “Lonesome Polecat” and “Sobbin’ Women” (the title of the Stephen Vincent Benét story that inspired the screenplay). The real star of the show, however, is Michael Kidd’s choreography, which makes energetically thrilling dance numbers out of such frontier work as chopping wood. The picture received positive reviews, healthy box office and a number of awards and nominations, but today’s audiences will have to choke down a key plot point that has the brothers abducting the titular brides and basically holding them captive until they give in. Well, Benét did base his tale on the ancient Roman legend of the Rape of the Sabine Women.  But yeah, that gymnastic barn-raising number, featuring such dance greats as Matt Mattox, Jacques D’Amboise, Julie Newmar and Russ Tamblyn, is one for the ages. 

The Great American Pastime is given the period musical treatment in Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949). Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra play a couple of ball players who spend the off season on the vaudeville stage. In addition to the title tune, the 1908 unofficial anthem of American baseball, composer Roger Edens and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote songs just close enough to the early 20th century setting while still appealing to audiences of the late 1940s. Esther Williams is Kelly’s love interest, and yes, the movie does manage to get her into a swimming pool, a sequence added when she was cast to replace Ginger Rogers, who dropped out of the production. Busby Berkeley is credited as the director, but Kelly and Stanley Donen did most of the work when Berkeley was largely out of commission, purportedly due to his chronic depression and alcoholism.

The baseball film earned middling reviews and box office, but a subsequent teaming of Kelly and Sinatra, as sailors on leave in Manhattan, ranks in many estimations as one of the all-time great musicals. Based on a popular Broadway play, On the Town (1949) is notable for its New York location shoots, particularly in the fun opening number, “New York, New York” (not the one from the Scorsese film), which takes the leads on a romp through the major sites of the Great American City. Comden and Green, who wrote the original play, provide the lyrics, set to music by Leonard Bernstein (the play’s composer) and Roger Edens (additional songs written for the movie after much of Bernstein’s score was deemed too complex and theatrical for the screen). The cast also includes Jules Munshin and Betty Garrett in roles similar to the ones they played in the baseball movie. No Berkeley this time, though; Kelly and Donen handled the direction from the get-go, and Kelly choreographed. The film was a critical and box office success and in 2006 was ranked #19 in the American Film Institute’s list of Greatest Movie Musicals.

For sheer patriotism and rousing musical numbers, however, it’s hard to beat Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), a glorification of the great American showman George M. Cohan, aka “The Man Who Owned Broadway.” Cohan earned the title for his involvement as writer, director, producer, composer or star (many times all five) in more than 90 stage productions between 1901 and 1940. The film incorporates a number of Cohan’s classic songs, including the patriotic numbers “Over There,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “The Yankee Doodle Boy,” in which he claims to have been “born on the Fourth of July.” (Cohan was actually born July 3, 1878, and died a few months after the picture’s release in 1942.) The real glory goes to the film’s star, James Cagney, who brought his Depression Era brashness and earlier background as a song-and-dance man to the role. Although his own style was a good fit for Cohan’s stiff-legged dancing and half-recited singing, Cagney was initially averse to playing Cohan, whose conservative values clashed with the actor’s leftist sensibilities. Ironically, that political stance led to Cagney taking on the role. Faced with allegations of Communist sympathy, he was convinced to play Cohan by his producer brother, who advised Cagney to counter the negative reputation by making “the goddamndest patriotic picture that’s ever been made.” It worked, and the star won his only Academy Award.

It’s tempting to consider what Cagney might have done with the lead in Meredith Willson’s classic musical The Music Man (1962), which satirizes and ultimately glorifies small-town life in the American Heartland. The role of Professor Harold Hill, a traveling conman transformed by the warmth of fictional River City, Iowa, and the love of a sweet librarian, is now indelibly tied to Robert Preston, who starred in the hit Broadway production. But when Warner Brothers bought the film rights, studio head Jack Warner didn’t think Preston was a big enough name, despite his having appeared in three dozen films since the start of his career in 1938. Warner wanted Cagney, Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra, and even offered the part to Cary Grant, who told Warner he wouldn’t even see the movie if Preston wasn’t cast. Finally Willson exercised the cast approval clause of his contract and Preston prevailed. The film was a big critical and commercial success, and several of Willson’s songs have become popular standards, including “Till There Was You” (later covered by The Beatles), the rousing “Seventy-Six Trombones” and Preston’s virtuoso quick-fire recitation of “Ya Got Trouble.” The old patriotic saw “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” written in 1843, also gets trotted out in the film’s Fourth of July scene.

Jack Warner successfully insisted on a bigger Hollywood star for the film adaptation of My Fair Lady (1964), casting non-singer Audrey Hepburn in the lead over Julie Andrews, who had risen to fame in the Broadway musical. Having been resoundingly criticized for that move, he decided to retain most of the stage cast for his film of 1776 (1972), even though William Daniels (as John Adams), Ken Howard (Thomas Jefferson), Howard Da Silva (Ben Franklin) and others were hardly household names. The “resolutely unmemorable” songs and the historical liberties taken, rather than the actors, took the blame for the low critical opinion of this musical recounting of the nation’s founding and the creation of the Declaration of Independence. Nevertheless, it brought in big audiences for its initial Radio City Music Hall engagement, and Vincent Canby of the New York Times said it was “the first film in my memory that comes close to treating seriously a magnificent chapter in American history.” 

The transition from British colonies to the United States is treated in two earlier dramatic films. The Devil’s Disciple (1959), somewhat recklessly adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s 1897 satire, is set during the 1777 Saratoga Campaign of the American Revolution, pitting two rebels (Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas) against the British General John Burgoyne (Laurence Olivier). The conflict carried over into real life. The highly disciplined and respected Olivier was miserable in his supporting role next to the brash, extroverted American stars, and kept calling them by each other’s names. Whether that was intentional or not, it quickly became very irritating to Lancaster.

Barely remembered now, The Scarlet Coat (1955) has become something of a TCM staple on Independence Day for its swashbuckling treatment of the Revolutionary War by director John Sturges, best known for Westerns (The Magnificent Seven, 1960; Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 1957) and action pictures (The Great Escape, 1963; Bad Day at Black Rock, 1955). Cornel Wilde plays an American officer who goes undercover to expose the schemes of traitor Benedict Arnold.

The day’s programming concludes with Ah, Wilderness! (1935), the first film adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s 1933 family comedy-drama, a surprisingly warm and sentimental departure for the playwright, best known for dark, complex dramas. Set largely on the Fourth of July, the original stage production starred, appropriately, George M. Cohan. Producing studio MGM pulled together a distinguished cast, including Oscar winners Lionel Barrymore and Wallace Beery, Eric Linden, Spring Byington, Charley Grapewin, Cecilia Parker and Mickey Rooney, and added the obligatory fireworks scene. The movie was such a success that the studio reunited most of the cast (minus Beery) for the comedy A Family Affair (1937), which became the basis for the popular Andy Hardy film series.