1940 – The Boys From Syracuse
I don’t know what I was expecting when I sat down to watch this movie, but it wasn’t this. I mean it was a fun movie that accomplished its narrative goal, but I was expecting some visual effects that were a little above the norm. But I’ll be honest, while the movie itself was silly and fun, there were very few effects to speak of. So I’ll try to give an account of what there was.
I think the movie’s big effect was that of having the same actor on different sides of the screen, but this was actually done pretty seamlessly. They didn’t always stay on their own side. There were shots where an actor’s arm passed in front of his split-screened counterpart perfectly. And I think those were the shots that earned the movie its nomination. They didn’t use the effect much, but when they did, it was pretty good. So I’ll give them credit for that much.
But there were other effects in the movie that were pretty poorly done. For example, there was a chariot chase scene where they used either rear projection or compositing. But the actor being filmed in the foreground looked like they were in front of a rear projection screen. They didn’t do a very good job of blending the two images. It looked really fake. There was another gag shot where they were looking at an hourglass above a Greek temple that was supposed to be like a big public clock on top of a bank. But again, it didn’t blend with the rest of the image at all. I mean, sure, it was just a one or two-shot gag, but it looked pretty bad. And I don’t know if the sand in it was real, or if it was animated, but it looked wonky. I’m guessing some people might think that the less-than-perfect effects might be part of the movie’s silly charm, but I wanted more for an Oscar nod.
Then there was another sequence where the camera was fixed on the bottom of a slope, and actor after actor kept falling and sliding into the frame at the bottom of the slope. So they would send a few actors down, but then you could actually see the cuts where they had stopped the film, and then started it again, as more actors slid into the frame. It was a fixed image, and it should have been more seamless, like an endless stream of actors were falling to the ground. For that matter, why didn’t they just do a continuous shot, and have all the people they wanted sliding onto the screen? It felt like it was just rushed and shoddy work.
But I’m being nit-picky because I also have to consider the caliber of work being presented in other movies in the same year. Just look at the effects in movies like Dr. Cyclops, Foreign Correspondent, or The Invisible Man Returns. They all far outshone the visual effects in this silly slapstick comedy. If it weren’t for those few split-screened shots of a single actor appearing as two characters in the same image, I doubt this movie would have been nominated at all.