Because I have no particular reason to believe that today will be any more blogging-friendly than yesterday, a little something I’d like to share that I encountered a few days ago.

It’s a strange little musical number from Paramount’s International House, itself a strange little picture – an ensemble comedy starring a host of vaudeville figures, and the famous real-life golddigger Peggy Hopkins Joyce as herself (it’s also one of the films that launched W.C. Fields as a feature star). The strange little plot involves a host of important businessmen bidding on a Chinese inventor’s prototype television, a bulky creature taking up half of a room and able to broadcast anything happening anywhere in the world. This is largely a pretext for various performers to do their thing for a couple minutes.

One such performance is Cab Calloway’s “Reefer Man.” The song is apparently well-known to Calloway aficionados (among whom I do not number, although I’d like to), but what strikes me is less the song and more its presence in a Hollywood movie, proving again just how strange a beast the pre-Code era really was. And it speaks to a completely different worldview on drug use; I can’t imagine a song like this getting released now, or really at any time in the last 60 years.

(larger here)