Free Republic

Nineteen-thirty-six seemed like a turning point in America after seven years of the Great Depression. The stock market recovered to its 1929 levels, for which voters rewarded Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a second term, which unfortunately began with the country slipping back into recession in the spring of 1937. With that kind of good news you can forgive Hollywood for imagining, if only tentatively, that America had turned a corner. In the first scene of the 1936 screwball classic My Man Godfrey, we find William Powell's Godfrey in shabby surroundings, living in a shack in a garbage dump on the...

Even if you love the genre, it's hard to say whether the world of the screwball comedy is a kind of paradise or simply a circle of hell. It is, to be sure, its own world – a parallel universe where stereotypes exist to be mocked, inhibitions are quickly overcome, and the usual laws of action and reaction take a circuitous, often improbable route. The fact is that screwball started in the wake of the Production Code, when there were things that could no longer be shown, so they were talked about instead, by the kinds of people who knew...

[snip] Joey Cook is back! Check out what we did with Cage The Elephant's "Ain't No Rest For The Wicked" from Borderland, also starring clarinetist Jacob Scesney doing a bit of decorating. [/snip]Ain't No Rest For The WickedVintage Jazz | Cage The Elephant Cover ft. Joey CookPostmodernJukebox | 5.86M subscribers7,366,351 views | January 12, 2017