Best special effects in classic movies?

Cafe Society
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Last night I caught a portion of the 1946 movie “Humoresque”. The plot was billed as Joan Crawford tragically becoming romantically involved with up-and-coming classical violinist John Garfield.*

The film has close-up sequences of Garfield playing the violin, and while I could imagine a separate soundtrack making his efforts listenable, there was no way a novice could simulate the bow work and fingering which appeared professional (never mind that Garfield looks more like a middleweight boxer than a violinist). I researched “Humoresque”, and while one source claimed that Garfield learned to play the violin for the movie (yeah, right), other accounts are more believable.

A long-time favorite special effect is the house falling on Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (no stunt double involved).

Your favorite movie special effects from before the software revolution?

*suspecting that any romantic involvement with Joan Crawford probably would be doomed. :frowning:
**“Humoresque” also features Oscar Levant, who was an accomplished concert performer.

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Is the house falling on Buster Keaton a special effect or a really good stunt. Buster Keaton has a lot of good stunts. Harold Lloyd has a lot as well, such as the scene on the clock in Safety Last.

I like the transformation of Spencer Tracy from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.

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Sword fighting skeletons! Ray Harryhausen!

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IIRC, in, “Werewolf of London,” one of the transformation scenes involves Henry Hull walking behind a series of posts getting more wolf-ish with each pass. It’s seamless and quick and very effective.

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Kermit the Frog riding a bicycle in the Muppet Movie was very well done, and hilarious. I vividly remember seeing it in the theater when it came out, and everyone oohing and ahhing at that scene.

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I’d call the Keaton house gag a stunt, not a special effect. AFAIK, what you see in the film is exactly what happened on set. Harold Lloyd dangling from the clock is a special effect, because they used foreshortening to make it appear that he was dangling from a tower, when in reality, he was just a few feet above some mattresses.

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I didn’t know until recently that the “SHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIT!” scene from, “Butch Cassidy…,” is a matte painting.

Same with Obi-wan turning off the tractor beam in Star Wars IV.

ETA: Also the beginning of Romero’s, “Day of the Dead,” has a zombie horde walking down a matte painting of a street in Florida (Naples?)

Love a good matte painting effect.

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The tornado in The Wizard of Oz still holds up.

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One of my favorites.

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Fredric March’s version was better. Note how the shadows on his face appear in real time.

The technique:

[spoilers]March wore red makeup. The scene was first shot under red lighting, which slowly turned white, making the read visible.[/spoiler]

And, of course King Kong

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Plenty of good effects.

I agree with Gato about Ray Harryhausen (And Willis O’Brien, and even Jim Danforth) Good stop-motion anumation was the go-to technology in pre-CGI days for dinosaurs and other impossible creatures, easily surpassing costumes and rod-puppets.

Of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey is the Gold Standard of Special Effects. Kubrick’s innovative interacting chemicals far outclassed the clumsy attempts they used for the background of the credirs sequence in the first Superman movie. The front-projected scenes were flawless, the color-separated hand-drawn mattes gave perfect space scenes, and the rotating centrifuge set is better than any similar scene in the movies.

All the effects in Forbidden Planet stand up remarkably well

The original King Kong used innovative effects techniques, too, including some that were invented for the picture (like Miniature Rear Projection). Unles you study the effects closely, you don’t realize that many effects shots contain four or more levels of effects trickery. the shot of Kong fighting the plesiosaur in the cave (it looks like a giant snake, but if you look close you’ll notice that its body is not really a tube, and it has four flippers) is a case in point. You’ve got the animated figures of Kong and the plesiosaur, the forced-perspective set, the glass painting surrounding it, the miniature rear-projected images of Ann (Fay Wray) and Driscoll (Bruce Cabot), and, superimposed over it all, the streaming vapor from the water. It’s a helluva lot of work.

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Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent has a hair-raising, realistic aftermath of a plane crash. The wrecked plane seems to be tossed on a horrific ocean, but the scene is filmed in a tank and the backdrop is rear-projection. With every big wave that seems to come crashing from behind the plane, water gushes from the windows as though the wave went right through it.

It’s realistic enough to give me goose bumps, but I have a barely-suppressed phobia of flying. I shouldn’t watch that scene anymore.

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One of my favorite effects scenes from an old movie is the opening of Rouben Mamoulian’s version of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, the one with Fredric March. as I’ve said on this Board, many times, it starts with a POV shot of Jekyll playing the organ. His butler calls to him, and the camera swivels over to look at him. from Jekyll’s POV we see him get up, walk to the door and through it. As he passes the mirror in the hallway he looks directly into it and sees himself. The butler puts his coat on him, and Jekyll turns to go down the hall. The butler is already there, and opens the door, and jekyll goes out to the street and his cab. This is all done in one unbroken shot.

It must have been well-rehearsed, because it’s really complex, and a lot of things had to go right for it to work. They built a complete mirror-image room on the other side of the “mirror”. The guy playing the butler had to run around really fast to get from “mirrorland” to open the door (or else they had two identical-looking guys, identically dressed).

The scene was so impressive that people copied elements of it in later years. In one of the “Director’s Cut” scenes for Terminator 2 they had a similar mirror scene where they’re taking the memory chip out of Arnold’s head. After setting up the scene with a REAL mirror (framed in Post-It Notes), moving it to let you see it’s a mirror, they cut to a new shot where the “mirror” is an opening to a mirror set. In “Mirrorland” is the real Arnold and Linda Hamilton. In the “real world” is the model of Arnold’s head, with the hole and chip, and Linda Hamilton’s sister, playing the “real” Sarah Connor.

They duplicated the “actor changes around” bit of the butler in the first Superman movie (directed by Richard Donner, starring Christopher Reeve). When Superman flies off, after his first date with Lois, it’s clearly Reeve in his Superman suit, on wires. In an unbroken shot the camera tracks around to look at Margot Kidder as Lois. There’s knock at her apartment door, and she answers it, letting Clark Kent in. It’s, again,. clearly Christopher Reeve, dressed as Kent, his Superman suit nowhere in evidence. They had to move really fast to do all this smoothly. Ther are no “jumps” to indicate cutting of the scene, and this was too early for CGI “smoothing” of such jumps.
An echo of the OP’s John Garfield with the violin is The Sting, where you see Paul Newman’s character, Henry Gondorff, doing card tricks. The camera watches the moves, and, at the end, when you’re convinced that they just filmed a card expert doping these tricks, the camera tracks up to show Paul Newman’s face. Movie sites, like imdb, say that they cut away, and they DID use a card expert. But watch the shot carefully – it’s clearly an unbroken shot. That really is Paul Newman doing those moves.

Nowadays you can easily blend different scenes together to give the illusion of an unbroken shot – they did it during the “house collapse” chase scene in Sprecte, but they had CGI to help with that.

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The Statue of Liberty climax from Hitchcock’s Saboteur holds up pretty well. Obviously not filmed on the actual statue, it’s a great combination of a life-size mock up of the hand and torch, matte work to suggest the height, reverse filming (for the villian’s fall, he was lifted towards the camera on a hidden chair, then the film was run backwards to make it look like he was falling away - standard effect today, but quite innovative in 1942).

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If you’ve ever watched the plethora of 1950’s black & white sci-fi films, then you know how bad bad can get when it comes to not-so-special effects. A remarkable exception to this, however, is the 1953 version of, “The War of the Worlds”, starring Gene Barry and Ann Robinson. Not only is it in color, but it has, what was for that time anyway, rocking special effects. It just totally stood out from its 1950’s peers in terms of quality.

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My favorite special effects scene is the flight of Faust and Mephistopheles in F. W. Murnau’s “Faust” from 1926. It’s the most breathtaking scene from a silent movie I’ve ever seen, and I have no idea how they did it, but the scenery and landscape are wholly a model, and combined with the cloud effects and the camera work (how did they DO it at that time?), it makes me speechless every time.

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I beg to differ. There were several 1950s science fiction films with effects as good as or better than War of the Worlds. The aforementioned Forbidden Planet, for one. And This Island Earth, for all its stupidity, had some great effects. Also Destination Moon and Conquest of Space (both George Pal films, like War of the Worlds). When Worlds Collide[ wasn’t bad, either, except for that awful glass painting shot at the end (and it was by Chesley Bonestell, no less. It should’ve been great). all of these were color films.
Another landmark 1950s film was The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. It was black and white, but it’s notable because

a.) It was the first “1950s monster movie”. It had all the cliches of that genre, but, since it was the first, they weren’t cliches when it did them.

b.) It was Harryhausen’s first major movie solo effort, and he didn’t have Willis O’Brien’s army of technicians to build forced-perspective sets and contribute elaborate glass paintings. So he was forced to invent his “Dyanamtion”/“Dynarama”/“Reality Sandwich” technique to “drop” his giant animated monster into New York City. A major technical innovation created from sheer necessity.

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Censors made them show the monster outlined in laser beams. They believed the always invisible monster to be too frightening.

Orson Welles said that the shot of the opera, from the singer up to two guys in the rafters, was done in a single pan, but they had to cut some of it because it took too long.

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I’m gonna have to ask for something to substantiate that claim. I’ve never run across anything like it in all my readings about the film.

Besides, we didn’t really have “film censors” – individual states had film boards, but they lost a lot of power in 1952. “censorship” in the movies was largely self-imposed to avoid state restrictions. If anybody would have insisted on making the monster visible, it’s be the officials at MGM studios.

They DID originally intend to have to Krel Monster invisible, but I don’t know who changed it to being made visible. It was pretty effective, with Joshua Meador and other Disney animators contributing. It doesn’t look like something done under duress.

And it’s hard to believe that, after the Universal Invisible Man films, not to mention all those Monogram serials with invisible menaces, that anyoine would insist on THIS invisible menace being made visible. What about all those scenes where the monster WASN’T visible?
And what does it say that the next film several of those responsible for Forbidden Planet went on to make was The Invisible Boy?

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I may be misunderstanding what part of this scene you’re impressed with (I do not deny that it’s an impressive feat), but FWIW, IMDb claims this is how it was done: