Red Time For Bonzo: A Marxist-reaganist Film Podcast

When proletarian Warner Brothers hightails it to the Ozarks, things can only go two ways: toward tragedy or rough mockery. Swing Your Lady offers a touch of the former (thanks primarily to genuine chemistry between unlikely screen lovers Louise Fazenda and Nat Pendleton), and a whole mess of the latter. There's not much Gipper in this one, but what there is, is choice - by now he's got his sharpie media character persona so well honed that he runs rings around wrestling promoters Humphrey Bogart, Frank McHugh, and Allen Jenkins (none of whom, it must be owned, is playing at the brighter edge of their respective character ranges). The film offers wonderful opportunities for your hosts to digress upon such weighty matters as "Ozark face" minstrelsy; the eruption of "hillbilly" music upon the popular scene during the 1930s; the strange careers and love lives of The Weaver Brothers & Elviry; a lengthy disquisition upon the unique properties of "The Old Apple Tree" (a tragi-comic lynching ballad); a potted his