69/100
Many decades before the likes of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Frank Miller's Sin City, there was the globetrotting comedy Trade Winds, which simply must hold the all-time record for largest percentage of a film to feature actors performing in front of old-school rear projection. Usually you see at most a few minutes of such process shots during a Golden Age classic; here, it's virtually every exterior in the entire picture, as murder suspect Joan Bennett flees to first Hawaii and then Shanghai and then Singapore and then there might be other locations I'm forgetting, with hired investigator Fredric March (and annoying imposed sidekick Ralph Bellamy) hot on her tail. Contemporaneous critics took umbrage ("Tay Garnett earned the distinction yesterday of being probably the first man in history with the temerity to invite 80,000,000 persons to pay to see the movies he took on a world cruise," huffed Frank Nugent in the New York Times), and it does get rather silly after a while...but the script that Dorothy Parker and others built around Garnett's various backdrops sports enough zing to compensate for how phony everything looks. The opening eight minutes alone constitute pure melodramatic insanity, with Bennett's society gal sitting happily at a piano during a cocktail party at 2:45, staring at her sister's corpse in the morgue at 3:02, shooting the sister's scoundrel of a lover in the chest with his own gun at 5:30, and driving her car off the San Francisco pier 2½ minutes later. Subsequent lengthy pursuit's your basic hunter-falls-for-prey routine, charming in itself and wonderfully complicated by Ann Sothern as the investigator's secretary, occasional fuck buddy (strongly implied) and eventual professional rival seeking to horn herself in on the reward money; I'd previously seen the younger* Sothern only in Letter to Three Wives, which I'm fairly certain gave little or no indication of how uproariously, sarcastically funny she could be. (Not at all surprised to learn that she had her own smash sitcom in the '50s.) Dialogue's often sharp ("Don't strain your eyes looking on the bright side" has to be a Parker line), and while the Production Code more or less dictated that our heroine must somehow not actually be guilty of murder (which actually gets telegraphed very early if you're paying attention—we see her shoot Mr. Cad in the chest, but the medical examiner, like one minute later, pronounces him dead of a bullet to the base of his skull), I still enjoyed the convoluted means employed to exonerate her. Plus there's a symbolic gunshot ejaculation and the movie ends with March visibly about to put his hand on Bennett's ass (after they both cutely knock wood on a piano bench), with Garnett cutting to the clinch just in time.
* Adjective necessary because I also saw, way back in 1987 when it was released, The Whales of August, in which Sothern was 78 but still younger than her co-stars, 79-year-old Bette Davis and 93-year-old Lillian Gish.