1935 Group Project

We have created a movie called "Trading Bases." Basically our movie is about a blue collar guys that asks his girlfriend to marry him. She says yes, but the day after he proposes to her he receives his draft papers to go fight in the great war, also known as WWI. So he goes off to war and they are both heartbroken. They can't live without each other. So during an accident, the soldier fakes his own death and starts on a long journey back home. Meanwhile, his fiance can't stand being without him so she pretends to be a man and volunteers for war so she can be with her husband to be.

Our genre is a war drama. With this, we could include the aspects of a war film, like exciting action, and also the aspects of a drama, like a love story. This works well because this appeals to more than one crowd of people. It appeals to both men and women.

As a studio we choose Fox. We chose Fox because it had the money to make big budget films. With this film we were going for a Hollywood type of movie where we would have many people go see it. So with the money that Fox provided, we made the sets for the war scenes more intense and realistic.We also chose Fox was because they were used to making dramas, which was a big part of our story. Another reason was because RKO had just come out with a war drama and Fox wanted to compete.


As our leading male role we went with Tyrone Power. We chose him because he was one of Fox's main stars, and even tough he did a lot of romantic comedies, he also did dramas as well. As our leading female role we went with Janet Gaynor. She was Fox's leading lady and became very successful when she started doing movies with sound. We also choose her because she was very attractive and that appealed to the Hollywood type movie. For a supporting role we went with Raymond Griffith who plays a general. We chose him because he was an old experienced actor that worked with Fox. John Ford would direct this film because he directed a lot of westerns which can be related to wars. He was also a big war fanatic. In our film we chose to highlight cinematography so we went with James Wong Howe. He was a very sought out cinematographer because of his use of shadows. We thought we could use him because he was one of the first to use and perfect deep focus, so we thought this would look good during battle scenes.

With the Hays Code we couldn't show the two lead actors' affectionate side. And also, we had to make the audience seem like the American soldiers were the good guys, to promote american values.

If I was working on this project alone, I would have changed it to just portray the soldier's journey home and have his fiance at home waiting for him.