[Late last year, in preparation for a podcast appearance of my wife’s, we watched Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and through it were introduced to the groundbreaking cinematographer and all-around amazing American James Wong Howe. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of contexts for Howe’s exemplary life, leading to this post on that podcast!]
First and foremost, when I drafted this week’s series Vaughn’s appearance on Mike Natale & Tom Lorenzo’s excellent You’re Missing Out podcast had not yet dropped. Now it has, so I wanted to make sure to share the link and ask you to check out this fascinating conversation about Yankee Doodle Dandy!
I’m not going to step on that episode’s toes by saying too much about their conversation, to which I do hope you’ll give a listen. But I did want to note two specific things about that film in relationship to this weeklong series and the life and legacy of James Wong Howe:
As I hope this whole series, and especially its middle couple of posts, has made very clear, Howe had an incredibly long, prolific, and influential career in Hollywood. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) came a couple decades into that career, and Howe would continue to work for another three decades after it, so it’s fair to say that it likely didn’t stand out that much for him (it wasn’t even his only 1942 film, as he also worked on Kings Row). But at the same time, as Vaughn and the guys discuss at length in that episode, this is a film that is centrally interested in the role that artistic and cultural works can play in our national story, to the point that it opens and closes with George M. Cohan receiving a Congressional Gold Medal from President Franklin D. Roosevelt (an event that did indeed take place in May 1940). I can’t imagine a filmmaker who more fully embodies both the American story and the representational power of cultural works than does James Wong Howe, and I love that he got to work on this project.
I don’t usually like to end blog posts, and especially not weeklong series, on a down note, but it’s chronologically necessary to follow those thoughts by noting that it was less than a decade later that the era of HUAC, McCarthy, and the Black List would come to dominate Hollywood (and America). As I highlighted in Friday’s post, those histories directly affected Howe through both his wife Sonora Babb and his own graylisting (leading to his working on no films in 1949, for example). And of course there’s no way to talk about the history of American film in the mid-20th century, and certainly not about a patriotic WWII film like Yankee Doodle Dandy, without discussing related topics like war and propaganda that so clearly connect with the rise of this regime of censorship and exclusion. If you want to read and learn and think more about all those topics, do I have a book recommendation for you: Vaughn Joy’s Selling Out Santa: Hollywood Christmas Films in the Age of McCarthy!
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. Check out the episode and let us know what you think!
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