J. Guy Swafford has one credit on the Internet Movie Database: this one. A web search turns up a photographer who lived in Keokuk around the turn of the century. Otherwise there's nothing.
All I know about Mr. Swafford is that he sounds a little like Eddie Cantor and he probably wasn't a professional narrator or radio actor. He stumbles over his lines and clears his throat a lot. He probably took these pictures, despite the IMDb crediting everything to John Randolph Bray. That's likely just an artifact of bad credits.
Putting aside that mystery for the moment, what can we say about this black and white travelogue, an episode of Bray's "The Rambling Reporter"? The series was getting near its end. Color travelogues were coming into prominence, like James A. Fitzpatrick's series at MGM. Some of the images are quite startling, like a boat drifting among the flooded plains of Kashmir between trees. The prose of the narration is a a bit purple. It's pretty good, but in a couple of years Jack Cardiff would head off to India to shoot travelogues in Technicolor. Those are great.
All I know about Mr. Swafford is that he sounds a little like Eddie Cantor and he probably wasn't a professional narrator or radio actor. He stumbles over his lines and clears his throat a lot. He probably took these pictures, despite the IMDb crediting everything to John Randolph Bray. That's likely just an artifact of bad credits.
Putting aside that mystery for the moment, what can we say about this black and white travelogue, an episode of Bray's "The Rambling Reporter"? The series was getting near its end. Color travelogues were coming into prominence, like James A. Fitzpatrick's series at MGM. Some of the images are quite startling, like a boat drifting among the flooded plains of Kashmir between trees. The prose of the narration is a a bit purple. It's pretty good, but in a couple of years Jack Cardiff would head off to India to shoot travelogues in Technicolor. Those are great.
