A very happy 250th Independence Day! I’m so grateful for my country, all its beauties, and all the blessings I’ve received from it. I’ll be especially praying today that God bless and guide America and all nations, and bring every nation closer to Him.
In honor of the day, I thought it would be fitting to highlight a few 4th-of-July themed scenes from classic movies. The first one is from what I consider to be THE 4th of July movie, Yankee Doodle Dandy. It’s about songwriter George M. Cohan, who wrote quite a few patriotic war-time songs and was in fact born on the 4th of July. Any 4th of July that we don’t watch this movie just feels like it’s missing something.
…for reasons unknown, WordPress will not let me embed the video. How vexatious.
Well, I’ll just link to it instead, I suppose. The song is “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” It’s a little bit like a mini US-history in 4 minutes with singing and dancing, and I absolutely love it. It gives me chills at points.
Next is a classic American anthem, God Bless America. The clip I’m sharing is from the movie This Is the Army, which I have not watched. (But its cast has greatly intrigued me – it stars George Murphy, Joan Leslie – both of whom I really liked in other movies – and Ronald Reagan!)
The song was first introduced by Kate Smith in 1938, but Irving Berlin originally wrote the ‘first draft’ of the song, if you will, while he was in the army during WWI. It’s a beautiful song which, again, just stirs the patriotic blood in me.
And lastly, there is a 4th of July sequence in Holiday Inn, and undoubtedly the best part of it – arguably the best part of the whole movie, in fact – is Fred Astaire’s firecracker dance.
It’s a classic case of “don’t try this at home, kids,” but man, is it cool to watch.
Happy 4th of July! How do you like to celebrate the 4th? Any patriotic songs/movie scenes you particularly like?
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