The 20th Amendment

Jack Haley stars in this 1930 short subject about the future. The year is 1950. Food comes in the form of little pills - such as a pill for eggs and another pill for bacon. Coffee comes in the form of a spritz from a spray bottle, administered by a maid. One day Haley opens the newspaper to discover that a 20th amendment has been passed, "compelling every male citizen to have as many wives as he can support...because too many unmarried men are leaving this country due to the enforcement of Prohibition, and in order to protect the American home and the country's future population." So Haley immediately opens his little black book and before you know it has gathered a whole harem, one wife for each day of the week. Miss Sunday is played by Evelyn Hoey, with whom Haley sings a ditty with music by Jay Gorney and a lyric by E.Y. ("Yip") Harburg entitled "You're the Cure for What Ails Me (Baby, You're Doin' Me Good").

This featurette is notable for three reasons: (1) It teams Haley with lyricist Harburg for the first time. Several years later Haley would play the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. (2) It is perhaps the only celluloid record of Hoey, a noted Broadway musical comedy star whose credits included Cole Porter's Fifty Million Frenchmen.(3) The songwriting team of Harburg and Gorney would go on to write "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" ("the anthem of the Depression") two years later.

It should also be mentioned that the song Haley and Hoey sing is not the same as another song with the same title from the 1936 Al Jolson musical The Singing Kid. That one was written by Harold Arlen with Harburg. The two compositions have nothing in common except their titles.