Days of Glory – 1944
The visual effects for this movie were good, there’s no doubt about that, but I think they could have been better. This is one of those cases where there was really nothing wrong with the effects, but there was, I think, a little room for improvement. It was a war film, so there were the obligatory explosions and gunfire, and there were some good fire effects near the end. There were also some pretty good rear-projection shots that were impressive.
The first big money shot was about half way through the movie, when the good guys put a bundle of dynamite under the train tracks to destroy a Nazi train. The explosion was pretty spectacular, and was done, I’m guessing, using a clever combination of a scale model of the train, a practical effect of a fantastic explosion, and all of that being projected in front of the actors who had set the trap. It was very well-done, but what really sold the effect was what happened next. As the freedom fighters are running from the scene of the explosion, you could see burning debris falling all around them. It was almost a subtle effect, but it added a lot to the realism.
Another effect that almost escaped my attention was one of snow. Unless they filmed on location in a place where it was snowing, the snow, itself, was a visual effect, and the illusion was perfect. Nothing to complain about there.
But it was the film’s climax that was the most impressive. Again, it looked like a model of a tank climbing over a wooden barrier, in the snow, and being shot at by a cannon. When the cannon shell hits the tank, it topples, and the barrier it is scaling crumbled beneath it. That effect was projected in front of the live actors who were firing the cannon. All in all, it was a pretty spectacular illusion. The only problem was that the tank looked too much like a projection. It was out of focus and didn’t seem entirely part of the same image as the actors. But it was almost there. I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t like the effect, or that the illusion didn’t work. The fact was, that despite that slight disconnect, it did work, just like the final scene. The Guerillas were shooting at a tank and it gets set on fire. The Nazis have to climb out of the tanks, and there is fire both in front of and behind the actors. The blaze was pretty spectacular. And then, when our two leads are run down by another burning tank, the flames grow and spread, until it seems like the entire screen is set ablaze. In fact, the final shot before the end credits was one where that fire faded into a glorious sky full of glowing clouds, implying that our dead heroes went out in a blaze of glory, and are now saints in Heaven. Well, I don’t know if that’s what was intended, but it worked well enough. At any rate, it gave credence to the film’s title, Days of Glory.