Dumbfounded: Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey

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...