Starring Joel Gray, Nanette Fabray, Bernadette Peters, and Jack Cassidy
Directed by Martin Charnin and Walter C. Miller
Music and Lyrics by George M. Cohen
We kick off two weeks of All-American Weekdays with a pair of patriotic biographies. The flood of Broadway adaptations was still so all-persuasive in the early 70's, it even reached television. George M! debuted on Broadway in 1968. Cohen passed away shortly after Yankee Doodle Dandy came out, which allowed the stage show to be more honest about Cohen's two marriages and his dust-ups with the actor's union Equity later in life. How well does Cohen's colorful and complex personality come across on the small screen? Let's begin in the theater where the show is rehearsing and find out...
The Story: George (Gray) is added to Jerry (Cassidy) and Nellie's (Fabray) vaudeville act almost immediately. He's soon joined by another trooper, his little sister Josie (Peters). They work their way up the theater circuit to play for none other than impresario E.F Albee (Jesse White) in Cedar Rapids. He's not impressed, first claiming he'll only take Josie, then offering them a few weeks in New Jersey. George won't be happy with anything less than New York and books them into a small theater there. It's there he meets his first wife Ethel and finally convinces her to marry him and join the act.
"The Five Cohens" are now a success in vaudeville, but George wants more. He creates a full-length musical around their act. The first one, The Governor's Son, isn't a success, but he finally hits the big time with his second show Little Johnny Jones. He joins with producer Sam H. Harris (Red Buttons) to create a series of wildly popular shows in the late 1900's and 1910's, all around the same theme of the young American man making good.
But by the end of World War I, the stage has begun to evolve. Broadway's unionizing, but George sides with the producers despite being an actor and director too, making him very unpopular with his fellow thespians. He does continue to write and produce hits into the 20's, but they're often considered to be old-fashioned compared to the faster, shinier shows on the boards. Worse yet, his parents retire, then pass away, his sister gets married, and Ethel leaves him. George finally retires with his second wife Mary (Danner), but he's too restless to stay away from the stage for long...
The Song and Dance: If nothing else, at least this movie's honest about its low-budget origins. We don't even have the cardboard sets seen in other TV musicals of the time. It's just a group of talented people discussing George M Cohan's life and singing his songs on a bare stage, and it's more riveting than you might think. Gray throws himself into the nervy, egotistical Cohen, playing him as a slightly more self-centered piece of work than Cagney did. Cassidy and Fabray are warm and charming as his parents, Peters is a lovely and sensitive Josie, and Red Buttons has a lot of fun in the second half as Cohen's energetic producing partner Sam H. Harris. I was especially impressed by the sequence towards the end where Jerry tells his son he's retired. Cassidy's notorious for being a ham, but he manages to play it beautifully and even touchingly.
Favorite Number: Our first real number is "All Aboard for Broadway," which the Four Cohens sing with cobalt blue derbies and canes in hand for E.F Albee. The song is so catchy, and the choreography is so much fun, you wonder why he wasn't impressed. The Four Cohens woo Ethel with George's explanation as to how courtship - like everything else in the new century - moves at the speed of light. It's "Twentieth Century Love" now. Ethel doesn't understand why he wants to conquer New York and Broadway so badly, but George does. It's "My Town," and he won't rest until he's a part of it.
Nanette Fabray puts over the sweet and simple ballad "Mary Is a Grand Old Name" as they explain how they convinced Fay Templeton to join the musical Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway. Cassidy and Buttons ham their way delightfully through the Irish dialect number "Harrigan." Peters discusses how Josie met the man she married in "Nellie Kelly, I Love You." George is supposed to perform the Rogers and Hart song "I'd Rather Be Right" in the end, from the show of that name, but he keeps making changes and forgetting he's not the boss. He ends with a dynamic "Yankee Doodle Dandy" to prove he still has the stuff for Broadway.
Trivia: George M! did relatively well in 1968, running over a year; Peters and Gray repeat their Broadway roles. It hasn't been in New York since, but it does occasionally turn up in regional theaters, along with the off-Broadway one-man show about Cohen's life, George M. Cohen Tonight.
What I Don't Like: This isn't for people looking for a big, elaborate show. It's about as bare-bones as you can get. I wish there was more showing and less telling. We hear about things like George's other shows and how they wore down Fay Templeton and convinced her to appear in Forty Five Minutes from Broadway, but we don't see them. They could have pulled someone from the chorus to briefly be Templeton. There's also "Over There," the World War I military march. It doesn't sound right performed as a slow ballad by Blythe Danner. Speaking of "Over There," this is also missing a lot of the lesser-known material that made it into the stage version, including almost all of the chorus numbers.
The Big Finale: Worth checking out at least once if you have any interest in Cohen and his work, the cast, or Broadway or TV musicals of the late 60's and early 70's.
Home Media: This rarity is currently only available on YouTube.
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