1940 – Typhoon
I’ll start this off by saying that this was a pretty short movie, only coming in at seventy minutes. And most of the movie was spent following the love story between Robert Preston and Dorothy Lamour. There were really only two big scenes that featured any big-budget visual effects. The opening scene showed a shim going down in a violent storm at sea. And then there were the last eight minutes or so that had two great effects. One is the jungle as it is set on fire by the bad guys. The other is the sudden typhoon that nearly submerges half the island and douses the conflagration.
These were great effects, but before I comment on them, I want to mention a couple of other effect that was used quite effectively and showed up in a lot of shots in the rest of the movie. They did a pretty great job using rear projection. The movie was in Technicolor, and they did a fantastic job of matching the lighting and color saturation of the background to that of the actors. It was pretty seamless. The other little effect they did well was depicting the interior of a rocking ship at sea. The camera had plenty of swaying motion, and things that were hanging in the cabin actually moved along with the rocking. And the actors reacted to the motion of the ship in the waving waters.
But as I said, I bet most of the effects budget went to the beginning and the ending of the film. The former scene showed violent wind and waves. There was water and spray everywhere, and you could see it being whipped about the thrown onto the actors. It was like a real high-powered gale. It was a great effect and ir really drew you in to the opening scene of the movie.
And then there was the big climax. So the bad guys set an oil fire in the jungle and our two lovers, along with the friendly Skipper, flee into the jungle. The fire was everywhere. It was shown in the rear projection, but there were also real flames in the foreground with the actors, showing how they were surrounded by the life-threatening flames. You knew the romantic leads were going to survive, but I kept expecting the Skipper to die under a burning branch falling from a tree.
But then the Typhoon showed up as quickly as a white squall. The seas rise up high enough to kill all the bad guys as they attempt to get back to their ship. When our heroes see it coming they fight to make their way back to Dea’s tree house. They struggled through wind and flood-level water to reach it. There was an exciting shot of the three of them grabbing a sturdy tree and holding on for dear life as they are submerged in water for a few seconds. There were also some great wide shots of the island as the massive waves rolled in and covered the burning trees, dousing the flames. The effects were pretty powerful, and made even more so because it was in Technicolor. It may have been a short film, but it really pulled out a lot of stops when it came to the visual effects. Kudos to both the filmmakers, and the actors who had to do their jobs in the midst of the over-the-top effects.