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Everything is Dandy in Yankee Doodle Dandy
As long as you’re a white man.
I am a finisher. I complete things. Checking things off a list gives me lady tingles — the good kind, not the see-a-doctor-immediately kind. But even though it went against my list-checking nature, I really wanted to skip the #98 film on the AFI Top 100 American Films list, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942).
The cover photo alone turned me off: A smug-looking white man wearing white gloves and a top hat decorated like a flag, surrounded by drawings of lily white showgirls dressed in powder blue. Its title doesn’t do anything to entice me either, based on a nonsensical, unpleasant song that should have met a violent death and been laid to rest during the Revolutionary War.
It also didn’t help that right off the bat, there is a warning that the film includes blackface. So I didn’t have to bother thinking I might be charmed by this one.
But I pushed past my preconceived revulsion and watched it anyway because I am a finisher. I complete things. And I am unemployed with a lot of time to kill.
Unfortunately, unlike my experience with #100, Ben-Hur, this film did not surprise me with even the slightest amount of watchability. Instead, it assaulted my ears and eyes with displeasing, blindly patriotic tunes from a bygone era and…
