Glimpses of Florida

No travel plans this summer? Don't feel bad! It happens to the best of us. In fact, for a good part of the last century, a vacation to places far or near wasn't possible for most American families. But thanks to the work of filmmaker, James A. Fitzpatrick, many American movie-goers got a glimpse of the globe thanks to a series of shorts distributed by MGM known as "Traveltalks" and "The Voice of the Globe". FitzPatrick had a career as a journalist in the 1920s, but an education in the dramatic arts put him on the path of film making. He got into work filming documentary shorts for American and British audiences in 1925. Over the course of the next thirty years, FitzPatrick wrote, directed, produced, and narrated many of his films, working in some creative capacity on nearly 300 travel documentaries. The hallmarks of these films for viewers was the beautiful Technicolor photography and FitzPatrick's stolidity in presentation.

As it so happens that this blog's usual moderator and "post"-er extraordinaire so happens to be vacationing in Florida, I thought it would be appropriate to offer our audience a fine film of Florida, from 1941. Think of this film as not just a travel documentary, but it also serves as a window to another time. Enjoy!