A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Saturday, January 24, 2026

Trade Winds (Tay Garnett, 1938)

Fredric March and Joan Bennett in Trade Winds

Cast: Fredric March, Joan Bennet, Ralph Bellamy, Ann Sothern, Sidney Blackmer, Thomas Mitchell, Robert Elliott. Screenplay: Tay Garnett, Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, Frank R. Adams. Cinematography: Rudolph Maté. Art direction: Alexander Toluboff, Alexander Golitzen. Film editing: Otho Lovering, Dorothy Spencer. Music: Alfred Newman. 

Tay Garnett's Trade Winds is the product of a trip he took to the Far East, accompanied by  cinematographer James B. Shackelford (credited with "foreign exterior photography" on the film). When he got back to Hollywood, he cobbled together a story that would use the scenic footage Shackelford shot, and then hired a crew of writers that included Dorothy Parker and her husband, Alan Campbell, to come up with a screenplay. What they gave him is a goofy mess about a woman (Joan Bennett) accused of murder who flees to various Asian locales, and a detective (Fredric March) who follows her, trying to collect the $100,000 reward for her capture. Naturally, they fall in love. In addition to March and Bennett, the cast includes Ann Sothern as his (you guessed it) wisecracking secretary and Ralph Bellamy in one of the doofus roles he specialized in during the 1930s. The cast never left the sound stages of Hollywood, where they spent a lot of time posing or walking on treadmills before rear-projection screens that showed Shackelford's footage. It's a rather tiresome adventure comedy with an ending that doesn't make a lot of sense.   

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