The Thief of Bagdad – 1940 (WINNER)

This film had a lot of special effects that tied in very well with the bright and colorful production design.  It was a true fantasy, and after watching it, I now know where Disney got the story for their big animated feature, Aladdin, though some of the characters were changed around a little. This movie had a flying mechanical horse, a magical storm at sea, a giant genie, a flying carpet, a mystical viewing stone, and a giant spider.

Probably the most famous effect was the giant genie coming out of the bottle. Black smoke billows out, and the image of a sixty foot tall man fades in. That was the first proper use of the blue-screen process to create a traveling matte.  But in other shots, I must confess a slight disappointment. For example, during two separate close-up shots, when the young man crawled from under a stomping foot or stepped off of the giant hand, the genie’s appendages became slow and clunky animatronics. And the shots where the young man was on the genie’s shoulder, when he is holding onto his hair, just looked incredibly fake.  I applaud them for constructing the scale sets, but it was so obvious that I was taken out of the story.

But I liked the flying horse. They showed it being put together in pieces, then a shot of a whole fake horse as it is mounted, and finally, a still shot of a real horse’s head. After that, all they had to do was start the film rolling, and the horse began to move. They were able to blend the blue-screened image with the matte-painted background pretty seamlessly.  I’m sure it helped that the sky was blue.  The giant spider wasn’t too bad either.  Clearly, it was a life-sized puppet, but it had a bit of movement to it, and when Abu cut off one of its legs, there was actually a little blood to make it more real.  However, its oversized web looked and behaved too much like common rope covered with fake, cottony Halloween webbing.

And if I’m being honest, I also wanted more in other effects, as well, like when Abu got transformed into a dog. I don’t think they pushed the effect far enough. It was nothing more than a simple image of the man fading away, overlapped with the image of the dog fading in. There weren’t even any transitional images of a half man, half canine to make it more like morphing.  And while I’m ranting, too many of the blue-screened shots had the obvious blue halo around the actors.  But hey, it was 1940, and such things had never been done before, so I shouldn’t complain!

I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t enjoy the film or that it didn’t deserve its Best Special Effects award. I really think it did, and it was a fun movie to watch. It made great use of the new blue-screen technology effects.  It helped that the movie was just so full of fanciful visuals, giving audiences things they’d never seen before.  The director made the smart choice of filming in Technicolor, making them look even more dazzling to audiences who were still being treated to mostly black and white films. All in all, the Academy had plenty of reason to award this movie its Oscar.

 

The Wizard of Oz – 1939

The Wizard of Oz was a special effects extravaganza!  The effects were inventive, ground-breaking, and dazzling.  This movie was filmed in Technicolor, and the filmmakers used both the black and white and color pallets to marvelous effect.  I don’t want to take anything away from the wonderful effects of the 1939 Best Special Effects winner, The Rains Came, but I think Oz got robbed!

There were so many effects in the film, it is hard to know where to start.  But easily, one of the most memorable of them was the tornado!  The cyclone that carried Dorothy away to the magical land was amazing, and totally holds up, even by today’s standards.  Apparently, it was made from a thirty-five foot muslin stocking wrapped around chicken wire, which was rotated by a motor.  The base was attached to a car that was moved back and forth on a track.  The farmhouse, fence, barn, and prairie were all miniatures, and the clouds were painted on glass.  Composite in wind, dust, debris, and actors, and you have a fantastic twister!

Another of the film’s more iconic effects were the hideous flying monkeys. Of course, they flew with the help of thin piano wire, but the actors also wore battery packs that kept their wings flapping.  The witch’s sky-writing effect was done with a miniature witch riding a hypodermic needle filled with dye, which was injected into an opaque mixture of water and oil, and filmed from below.  The little detail of special water flowing into the tank, creating the effect of drifting air, was amazing.

Glinda’s floating bubble was made using a stationary silver ornament, and a precisely moved camera that created the illusion of a growing bubble.  After that, specially processed film, lab dissolves, and perfect camera placement completed the illusion.  The witch’s crystal ball effect was done by side-projecting images into a large glass bowl.  A mirror at a forty-five degree angle reflected the projection onto a translucent screen inside the bowl.  Masterfully done!

Other effects were achieved using pyrotechnics, smoke, little dashes of animation, mechanized miniatures, and matte paintings.  The Wizard of Oz pulled out all the stops.  The sheer quantity of effects in this movie far surpassed its competitors, and the inventiveness of many effects artists under the direction of Arnold Gillespie made for a phenomenal fantasy of a film.  It was truly a different time in filmmaking history, and the things that they were able to do with practical effects were simply mind-blowing. Today, it would all be computer generated, but there is a tactile charm to practical effects that seems to be making a bit of a comeback in modern movies.  I still think CGI is ultimately better, but practical effects can be just as impressive in the hands of creative and skilled effects artists.

Sorry, I can’t find this one.

Sorry, I cant find this one.

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex – 1939

This movie is a little hard to critique for Special Effects.  There didn’t seem to be anything special about them.  There were a few matte paintings and a short battle sequence, but aside from that, there wasn’t much to catch my attention.  Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not educated in film history.  I’m not very knowledgeable about movie magic of the 1930s and 1940s.  I know that there had to be a reason why this movie was nominated for the category, but for the life of me, I don’t really know what it was.

In fact, I even did a fairly competent search on the internet, trying to find anything that might explain what special effects I was supposed to be looking for, but still, I came up empty.  Then, I did a little reading about the category itself, and found that up until 1963, the concept of Sound Effects was part of the Special Effects category, at which time, Best Sound Editing became its own category. Perhaps this was nominated more for sound effects than visual effects.  But again, I did my research and could find no evidence to support this either.

Either way, with my limited knowledge about the subject, all I have to go on is what I can see on the screen.  What looked impressive?  What looked innovative?  What looked good… and what looked bad?  There was a sense of grandeur about the film, that stemmed from the sets which looked gigantic, though, I’m sure they were filmed on smaller studios.  The matte paintings looked perfect.

What I was not impressed with were the inside walls of the castle.  In nearly every scene that took place indoors, the walls looked like painted stage flats.  They tried to make them look like stone by painting bricks in the corners of the rooms, but they looked completely fake.  But I can’t push this off on Byron Haskin, the Special Effects Technician.  This would have fallen under the Production Design category.

As I mentioned, there was a brief battle sequence that had some gunfire, men getting shot with arrows, and a shot of Essex’s camp being torched in the distance.  But while these things were passable, they were nothing to write home about.  When a man would get pierced by an arrow, it was always in his back, and you could almost see the wooden board under his tunic.

And finally, there was one curious little expositional scene that took place outdoors at the Red Lion Inn.  One of the documentaries on the DVD explained that this was a composite shot, with the setting sun being a separate image from the foreground.  But watch the shadow of the man riding the horse.  Based on where the sun was in the sky, the shadow seems to be falling in the wrong direction.  Don’t get me wrong, I liked the movie.  I’m just not sure why it was nominated for Best Special Effects.  If someone knows, please fill me in!

Only Angels Have Wings – 1939

This was a great movie, made even better by some visually incredible special effects.  The plot was about a group of hard airplane pilots carrying airmail in the fictional South American town of Barranca.  There was a lot of wild stunt flying in propeller planes, takeoffs and landings in the narrow mountain passes, dangerous weather, crash landings, nitro-glycerin explosions, and engine fires.  Add to that a great shot of a mountain condor crashing through the front window of a Ford Trimotor, a ton of fog and rain, and an exploding aircraft, and you have some pretty impressive effects.  True, the movie was ultimately a romance, but it bordered on action and adventure.

The effects were all done really well and went a long way to enhance the narrative.  Within the first ten minutes of the movie, there is a terrible crash that kills a pilot.  The scale models used for the effect were spot-on.  Thick fog on the landing field appropriately obscured the pilot’s visibility.  He is ordered to stay in the air until the weather clears, but he is too eager to have dinner with the pretty woman to obey.  As he comes in, he is too low and his wing hits a palm tree.  It is torn off, and the plane takes a quick nose-dive before flipping over and landing up-side-down.

Then there was the dangerous stunt flying.  During a scene in which the new Trimotor airplane was being tested, the aircraft seemed like it was flying out of control, wildly twisting and turning in the air. The areal stunts were flown by Paul Mantz.  Another scene of a pilot landing a single engine plane on a tiny mesa made effective use of a matte painting to create the illusion that it was close to falling over a cliff.  To leave the mesa, Mantz flew off the edge of a cliff and performed a daring dive to pick up flying speed, skimming the ground before gaining altitude!

Of course, the film’s climax was when a flock of condors crashed into the Trimotor plane, and two of its three engines caught fire.  The shots where flames were being blown into the cockpit didn’t look like composite images, though I could be wrong about that one.  And then, after the burning aircraft made its rough landing, and the two pilots are dragged to safety, a rear-projection image was used to show the plane exploding behind the actors. 

But all the fog and rain fell under the visual effects umbrella as well, and they looked as believable as anything else.  There were even a couple of dazzling lightning bolts to illuminate a ship in the middle of a rainstorm.  I think that it can sometimes be easy to forget that those things had to be artificially created for the film.  According to Wikipedia, Only Angels Have Wings was the first film in which Roy Davidson and Edwin C. Hahn, were responsible for the effects, and I’d say they made a fantastic debut effort.

 

1. 
   Gone With the Wind – 1939

Sometimes, the best special effects are the ones that you don’t know are there. Everybody knows the movie Gone with the Wind because it is one of the highest grossing films of all time. They know its iconic characters. They know its timeless romance. And they know that it took home the Oscar for Best Picture in 1939.

One of the things that made the effects in the movie really stand out is that they were in color. But what many people don’t know is that there were color films as far back as 1903. The first movie to use the new Technicolor process was a film called The Gulf Between in 1917. Song of the Flame was the first feature length feature to be filmed entirely in Technicolor, and that came out in 1930.

Gone With the Wind was a major Selznick International Pictures production, and it had a great many special effects that were seamlessly constructed. One of the things that always catches my attention when I watch the movie are the beautiful skies and landscapes that dazzle the senses and give the story a feeling of lush grandeur. Most of those glorious color vistas were created using rear projection.

These backdrops were often blended with fantastic matte paintings that expanded the images, allowing the cinematographers to give us all those beautiful wide shots. But when you are watching the movie, your eye is naturally drawn to the action, even if it only takes up a small portion of the screen. Sometimes, the long line of houses that fill both sides of the screen and the massive mansion at the end of the road don’t even register. Of course, the shot would be different if they weren’t there, and the sense of scale the director was going for would be completely lost.

The shot that I am describing is the part in the film where a Confederate soldier is riding his horse down the middle of a long street, and Scarlett runs out to stop him. The live action was obvious, the houses and the mansion were matte paintings, and they were blended together into one impressive shot that only lasted a few seconds. It never occurred to me that so much of the shot was just a painting.

And then there was the amazing burning of Atlanta sequence. There were only a few shots where Rhett and Scarlett are shown in closeup as they are fleeing in the carriage, in which the rear projection didn’t seem to be part of the same image. But aside from that, the burning city, the collapsing buildings, the rain of fiery debris, and the exploding ammunition, all made for an exciting scene. Apparently, the burning buildings, filmed on the studio backlot, were the remnants of sets that had been constructed for past films, which had false fronts put in front of them.

And one last thing I noticed. There is a little scene in which Scarlett and Melanie are comforting an unseen soldier. Watch their giant shadows on the wall behind them. The shadows don’t move correctly with the actresses! Why, I ask. Why?

The Rains Came – 1939 (WINNER)

The special effects for this film were incredible.  There was a reason why this one was recognized as the best.  Most of the movie was a schmaltzy romance.  What film from that time wasn’t?  But its main complication came in the form of a monsoon rain in Ranchipur, India, followed by an earthquake, a broken dam, and a violent flood.  The romances were played out against this natural tragedy.

It’s true that even the start of the rain was a visual effect, as was the flooded streets after the destruction of the city.  But it was the quake and the flooding in the three minute and forty-five second sequence that was the film’s real money shot. First, let me say that there were clearly a lot of different images being composited together to create the scenes of terrible destruction.  But they were blended together so seamlessly that it was hard to tell where one image ended and another began.  Masterfully done!

Everything was calm.  Sure, the heavy rain was ever-present, but two of the lovers were still having their romantic moment out on a balcony.  Then the set unexpectedly shook and the chandelier in the adjacent room began to swing back and forth.  Everyone had a little fright and thought nothing of it.  But after a few seconds, the room shook so badly, the chandelier crashed to the floor.  The lights went out, and the screaming started!  Buildings began crumbling and the thunder and lightning became deafening!

Outside, we are shown a shot of the dam as it begins to crack!  A giant crevice opens up in the ground, just before the dam shatters and is carried away in pieces before the flood!  We see buildings collapse and bury people in rubble.  Again, these had to be perfectly created composite shots as the actors would have died if the effect had been done for real.  It was amazingly put together!

There was one shot in particular that I loved.  The harsh Lord Esketh, played by Nigel Bruce, and his manservant are trapped on a landing at the top of the stairs, the ground-floor level being filled with water.  There is a brief exchange between the two men, and suddenly, the window crashes in!  Water floods the landing as the tall wooden window blinds crush Esketh to the floor!  Then the entire wall explodes in an unbelievable onslaught of floodwater and debris, killing the poor servant.

The effects in the rest of the movie were excellently done.  More rain, more flooding, but nothing to compare with those few minutes of brilliant spectacle.  I was properly impressed.  The big effects scene was brief, but flawless. And for me, it overshadowed the rest of the more simple effects in the movie.  It was all good though, and I can understand why effects artist Fred Sersen took home the Academy Award for Best Special Effects for 1939.