1944 – Secret Command
OK, this is one of those Best Visual Effects nominees that I don’t get. Why was this movie nominated for an Oscar when it hardly had any visual effects, and the ones it had were nothing to write home about. I am certain I must be missing something. There just weren’t many effects beyond the standard rear-projection shots, and I’ve actually seen them done better than here.
I was so confused by this nomination that I had to do a little extra research, going beyond Wikipedia to look up any kind of article, review, or any other kind of reason on the internet that would explain. But I couldn’t find anything. All I could find were movie synopses, cast lists, and one reference after another that the nomination exists, but nothing explaining what effects in the film earned the Academy’s recognition. So here I am, admitting that I’m completely guessing, groping for an answer.
So there were two scenes that caught my attention as possible reasons. The first was when Chester Morris’s character, Jeff, risks his life to a critical piece of machinery and some men on a platform being lifted by a giant crane. The crane had been sabotaged and Jeff tries to repair it. But the saboteurs interfere with the repair and Jeff falls into the water. The camera is above the platform, and a mannequin was dropped past the platform into the water. It was an interesting camera angle, but I wasn’t impressed by a dropped dummy. Then we see Pat O-Brien, playing his brother Sam, jumps off the platform into the water to rescue him, and the underwater shots were interesting, but again, nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing better or worse than any other underwater scenes in films of the 1940s.
Then there was the scene where Sam and Brownie are fighting. They crash through a bunch of empty crates, and fall into the water. They briefly fight under the water, and Sam drowns the evil Nazi. Now, Brownie has already rigged a bomb to go off and destroy the ship that is being built, so I was all ready for a great explosion. But Sam disarms the bomb by yanking out a few wires and turning it off. We never get the explosion. And just as an afterthought, the nomination might also have been the result of superior sound effects, which may have been rolled into the Best Visual Effects category. I only entertain this theory because two of the men listed for the Visual Effects nomination were Russell Malmgren and Harry Kusnick. Both of them were sound engineers, and even though Best Sound had its own category at the Academy Awards, those two men were nominated as part of the Best Visual Effects category. But when it came to that, my completely uneducated ears didn’t hear anything about the sound effects that stood out as award-worthy.