User Reviews

James A. Fitzpatrick sends Winton Hoch and the Technicolor cameras to Saint Helena to shoot... well, there isn't much on St. Helena. Fitzpatrick quotes the saying that there are only two reasons to visit this barren island of four thousand souls: to see Longwood, where Napoleon spent his last years, and to mail a postcard.

Hoch takes some nice pictures, of course, and Fitzpatrick tries his best to make something deep and philosophical of it all. He doesn't.

James Fitzpatrick's TravelTalks series allowed people in the 30s and 40s to go to exotic lands from the confines of a theater. In this installment, we are taking a look at St. Helena, a small and pretty nondescript island several hundred miles off the southwestern coast of Africa. Originally discovered by the Portuguese, the island later came into the possession of the East India Company and given to Britain. Today, it is most well known as the final home of possibly the greatest military tactician the world has ever seen: Napoleon. As we can see from the technicolor footage, there isn't much to St. Helena, and even the narration itself says there's really only two reasons to visit the place: to see Napoleon's house and to mail letters with the very rare St. Helena postage stamp. Only 4000 people live on the island. We also learn that toward the end of his life, Napoleon's house was guarded by British soldiers, much to his dismay. Eventually, in the 1840s, his body was finally brought back to France even though he had been dead for 2 decades by this point. His body was placed in a sarcophagus made of quartzite at Les Invalides in Paris, where it remains today. Overall, there really isn't much to say about this short, which is sadly the case for most TravelTalks. They're difficult to comment on because Fitzpatrick gives a lot of details about the place in question, but unless you're writing down notes as you're watching, you're not going to remember all of them. Most aren't that important anyway. All you really need to know about St. Helena is that it's barely known about for a reason. Even with it being the site of Napoleon's final exile, most people can't even find it on a map.

TravelTalks goes to St. Helena, a British island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and South America. It is most well known as Napoleon's final prison. It's a small island and there isn't much to it. The Rail-sliders are probably the most interesting aspect. I think The Amazing Race went there once. That was more fun and more informative. This tells us that the postage stamps are one of the more desired souvenirs and it should at least show us a few of them. The problem with this episode is that it simply has nothing much to show. The last spoken line does come with a prophetic pre-war notion. Well, it does have that at least.

They manage to shoot the harbor/valley between 2 sea mounts for most of this piece, venturing partly up a path and watching 2 men slide down a huge staircase (the most interesting part of this pic). They did manage to shoot the original place of Napoleans grave. However, the narration and photography were much to sparse