THE PHANTOM PRESIDENT (1932)

After a recent series of B’way flops in various capacities (author/producer/director/ star), Hollywood finally enticed a demoralized, if never humbled, George M. Cohan into his Talkie debut. It also flopped (and a low budget indie two years later was apparently destroyed on Cohan’s instructions), but for anyone looking for clues to the charm & dynamism of James Cagney’s YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, this is all we have of this American institution. It’s both indispensable and a major disappointment. Cohan doubles as a dull businessman put up for president by a quartet of plutocrats, and as charismatic lookalike Medicine Show barker (WARNING: BlackFace Alert!!) paid hush-money to secretly front for him, stumping the hustings before bowing out at the White House doors. With Claudette Colbert as confused girlfriend and Jimmy Durante making a pest of himself as his confused tent show partner. You can see how this might have worked in a political convention sequence, a sung-through affair by Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart (loathing their first go as Hollywood tunesmiths), with Hawaiian natives ‘Aloha-ing’; a top-hatted All-Black New York delegation; coal miners from Pennsylvania, et al.); plus Cohan delivering promises in song-and-dance. Little else lands as intended. Short & peculiar, the film may not bore, but consistently misses the easy political target it aims at.

DOUBLE-BILL/READ ALL ABOUT IT: Cohan, who never had another success on his own stuff, returned to form as actor in Eugene O’Neill’s AH, WILDERNESS (filmed 1935 by Clarence Brown with Lionel Barrymore in Cohan’s spot) and in Rodgers & Hart’s FDR satire I’D RATHER BE RIGHT. (Cohan's intro number from it opens YANKEE DOODLE DANDY.) Rodgers tells the unhappy tale of working (twice) with Cohan in his auto-bio MUSICAL STAGES.