1945 – Captain Eddie
Well, here we are again with another movie that was nominated for Best Visual Effects, but had very few notable visual effects in it. But the few they had were done pretty well, so it wasn’t a complete confusion. The effects consisted mostly of rear-projection shots that matched pretty well with the actors in the foreground, though not all of them were perfect. Every so often, the front and back of the image on the screen looked too separate, but it worked more often than it didn’t.
The film actually opens with a pretty great sequence of an airplane going down and making an emergency wat landing. The passengers are forced to use life-rafts to survive, and there is a great shot of the airplane sinking beneath the waves. The rest of the movie follows the survivors who are cast adrift at sea, and the story of the title character, Captain Eddie, is told in flashback. But all the scenes of the men adrift on the water were particularly well-done. The images on the rear projection screens blended seamlessly with the actors and the set pieces in front of them.
There was a chaotic scene where the life-rafts are being tossed about in a storm, and there were a few competent lightning effects. The wind and the crashing water looked pretty real. The scene was brief, but that’s ok. It didn’t need to last too long. But the projection shot that I was impressed with took place during one of the flashbacks, when Eddie, as a child, paid for a ride in an old airplane, and it is attempting to take off. First, it almost runs into a herd of cattle, but then it achieves lift-off, and nearly runs into some trees. That effect looked pretty good.
But in the final scene, there were a few practical effects that looked pretty. The men in the rafts are finally spotted by passing airplanes. The airplanes eject several flares on little parachutes that light up the darkness. One of the planes makes a water landing to pick them up. It was a dark shot, but the three flares, the landing airplane with its rotating propeller, and the haggard men paddling towards the long-awaited rescue, made for a satisfying visual on the screen.
But for the most part, the movie was all story, and not much action. Most of it could be filmed on a controlled set, where not even a rear-projection shot or a matte painting were needed. It was all small-scale stuff. There were a few very short shots of some stunt flying, but nothing to write home about. Once again, I have to ask if I was missing something, and if anybody knows of a visual effect in this film that I’ve not mentioned or am not aware of, please feel free to let me know. But I do find it interesting to note that the very next year, 1946, the Best Visual Effects category had a shift. Instead of having between 5 and 10 nominations per year, it became only 2 or 3 nominations every year until 2010, except for 1979 that had 5. Now that was a year for visual effects!