The Sea Wolf – 1941
This was a good movie with some pretty good special effects. Based on Jack London’s famous adventure novel, the story gives us plenty of opportunities for some pretty cool visuals. But there is also a cast of wonderfully complex and realistic characters. Put them together, and you have a movie that easily keeps your interest.
The very first shot of the movie shows a massive clipper ship slowly emerging from a dense fog bank. It was a really cool image that immediately captured my interest. Then there is a great little sequence in which one ship rams another and sinks it. Those two little things went a long way to establish the quality of the special effects by Byron Haskin and Nathan Levinson.
Sure, as you might expect, there were a lot of scenes that made use of rear-projection, but fortunately, for the most part, the little details were adhered to. For example, the story took place on a clipper ship. There the projected sea in the background was constantly moving, though not so much that the people on the vessel would be losing their balance. There were even shots that took place below deck where the image was slowly rocking left and right, appropriately reminding the audience that they were not on land.
Other effects were nicely done, like when Dr. Prescot committed suicide by climbing up into the sails and then leaping to the deck. Sure, it was fairly obvious that they were dropping a dummy, but I think the effect was handled much better than, say, in the famous Hitchcock film, Foreign Correspondent.
The movie’s big climax was the sinking of the clipper, the Ghost. The visual effects team had to make it a slow process because there were several scenes that still had to take place on the boat, both above and below deck, before the ship went under the water. The Pacific had to slowly rise over deck over the course of several minutes. Even the interior of the captain’s cabin had to slowly fill with water as the actors played out their parts.
Unfortunately, in a movie with some otherwise good special effects, this one little sequence bothered me, but only slightly. In the final moments, the blind Captain Larsen stands alone in his cabin as the sinking of the Ghost gets faster. Half the ship is underwater and the deck is severely angled. However, the actors on the deck were clearly walking on a level set. Then we cut back to the interior of the Captain’s cabin. The encroaching seawater breaks the door in. It hits Larson, who doesn’t even move or react. I imagine that door would not have been made of cardboard. If you are blind and standing knee-deep in churning water on a tilted floor, and a large heavy object hits you from the side, you cannot stand perfectly still without so much as reacting to the blow. Just a little detail that took me out of the scene for a few seconds. But even after those minor complaints, I still liked the climactic sequence, and applaud the film’s special effects.