The Guns of Navarone – 1961 (WINNER)
This was a really great movie, but I had to ask whether the special effects deserve the Oscar they won, or not. And first my answer was: Sure, I guess. Why not? It was up against Disney’s The Absent Minded Professor, and while this was, without a doubt, a better movie, the visual effects were no better or worse than its competitor. And to be honest, I wanted a little something more from a winner.
The problem is that we’ve seen them all before. So were they done better than other films? Maybe. I’m not saying the visual effects were done poorly. On the contrary, they were done very well. But come on Hollywood! How many exploding scale models can we watch before they become just more exploding models, and is this what wins the award for Best Special Effects? Where was the innovation? Where was the creativity? Where was the inventiveness? Well, to give the movie proper credit, they were all there, though they were sometimes hard to spot.
The first really big effect we see is a storm that destroys a fishing boat and smashes it against the rocks. Until that point, all we had were some matte-paintings, a few blue-screened backgrounds, a bit of gunfire, and an exploding ship that sinks beneath the waves. Nothing new, right? But the storm was wonderfully violent, and I applaud the effects artists for a job well-done. The wind, the rain, the waves! They even had the elements blurring the overall image on the screen, adding to the storm’s realism. Then there was an interestingly shot sequence where the heroes had to do some rock-climbing up a sheer cliff in the rain.
After that there isn’t much, just a short sequence in which they are shot at by a couple of German planes, another in which a city is burned, and another in which a truck is set on fire and pushed into a ravine. That is, until the film’s explosive climax, the actual guns of Navarone! When they fired their massive shells, fire shot out of the giant barrels. And then when they, and the citadel in which they were housed, was destroyed, the explosions were magnificent! The scale models looked great as they were demolished and burned. It was all very impressive, even though it was really nothing new.
So where was that elusive inventiveness I mentioned? What caught my attention was the improved use of the blue-screen, a technology which had not yet been perfected, though they made the effect as invisible as they could. They blue-screened rain. They had actors wear dark clothing to help hide the telltale black outlines that surrounded them. They did a fantastic job of matching the lighting between the actors and the superimposed backgrounds. There were only a few shots in which the actors didn’t really look like they were part of their surroundings. But I suppose those imperfections were pretty easy to overlook.