Topper Takes a Trip – 1939
I was thoroughly unimpressed with the visual effects for this movie, and here’s why. They were by far inferior to the visual effects of the first film in the franchise, just called Topper. In fact, they even went so far as to take scenes from the first film and just put them into this movie as a kind of flashback, showing us effects that were lifted from the previous movie. But as for the new effects for this film, they felt sloppy, throw away. The whole shtick of the Topper films is that there are ghosts harassing Mr. Topper, doing crazy things that get him into funny trouble.
But when you really look at what was done for this sequel, it came down to just two effects, done over and over again. One is having a woman and a dog fading in and out, turning from invisible to visible, and back again. The other is having objects float or move with nobody touching them, and I’ll address that second one first. I’m sorry, but a door opening and closing on its own is not terribly impressive, whether it is a car door or a room door. A little more complex, though still pretty simple, is a depression appearing on a bed as a spirit sits on it wouldn’t have taken a lot of visual effects skill. Having a ball roll across a beach on its own is something I could engineer myself, in a pinch.
And then there was the actors fading into and out of the screen. That must have been a little trickier, but it doesn’t even seem to approach the complexity of the effects in other movies that were nominated for the category in 1939. Movies like The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, or the Oscar winner for that year, The Rains Came, were just better and more impressive. These effects didn’t even come close. The entire movie just felt like a cash-grab, an attempt to capitalize on the success of the first film. The effects seemed rushed and hastily thrown together.
For example, there was a scene where an invisible woman drinks a martini. The camera is focused on the floating glass. It tips and the drink begins to flow out. I could literally see the cuts in the film as they emptied the glass a little bit at a time. It was choppy and obvious, and again, I’ll say, sloppy. For another example, there was a scene when the ghost dog becomes visible, but only his front half. So half the dog is barking and trotting across the floor. It kept shifting in and out of focus, and the hard line where the black sheet was wrapped around the animal was, again, obvious. I felt that a little more care could have been taken with the effects.
Still, there was one thing they did pretty well. When there was a floating object hanging in the air, like a champagne bottle for example, and then the spirit materialized in the exact right position to be holding the bottle, must have taken a bit of precision, and I applaud them for that. That kind of thing happened several times in the film, and it was done pretty well. But for the most part, I don’t get it.