Union Pacific – 1939
The visual effects in this movie were good, but I think they could have been better. There were a couple of fantastic train crashes, but in both cases, I was quite aware that I was looking at a miniature train. I can’t put my finger on exactly what the problem was, but they just looked fake. The crashing railway cars looked like they had no weight to them. They looked like empty plastic models, and I wanted them to look more real, somehow.
But I’m speaking of the outside shots. In particular, the second crash, where a train is attempting to traverse rails that have been laid on snow. The snow drift, crumbles, the support beams fall away, and the train rolls down a mountain slope, spraying snow in all directions, felling trees, and skidding to a rough halt. As I said, it was good, but I think I just wanted it to look heavier, somehow. I wanted to see some more substantial damage.
But all that being said, most of the effects in the movie were just fine. When they changed to interior shots of the crashes, the collapsing walls and flying debris was good. People got buried and that was pretty cool. And the cause of the first crash was a pretty great explosion of water. Savage Indians cut the legs out from under a water tower and timed it to fall onto the approaching train. That was a pretty cool effect and it was done well. There was a great shot of an Indian on a horse pulling on the rope that bound the hatcheted wooden supports. The horse pulls hard, but the wood isn’t quite ready to break, and the horse tips over backward, the rider falling to the ground.
But train crashes weren’t the only effects in the film. There were plenty of rear-projected background shots, some done pretty cleverly. In one, Joel McCrea was filmed in the foreground. Then he left the frame and appeared in the background projection and walked into the distance. That was cleverly done. The problem was that the backgrounds were always slightly out of focus, making it obvious that they were images that were separate from the actors being filmed.
There were also some great gunfights and the Indian attack was exciting to watch. There were men on horseback, and men in the train cars, each shooting at each other. There were some great stunts as injured riders fell from their mounts while the horses were running at full speed. Even our heroine takes a bullet, without showing any blood, I noticed. So I think that overall, the effects were done well, but I’ll be honest, I’ve seen better from other films made in the same year. Movies like Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, and of course, the Oscar winner, The Rains Came, all had visual effects that looked more real, despite the fact that all of them used miniature models as well. Those other movies just did it better.