50's Realism
I love the way the wife is in full make up and high heels at 7 in the morning! Even in 1958 I doubt if many of them bothered.
shareI just watched this on Film 4 and one thing that looked so phoney is that the view out of Gideon's office window is a cardboard bridge over the River Thames complete with a flat cardboard bus and a flat cardboard lorry being pulled across the bridge on a piece of string. When they get to the end of the bridge, they are pulled back again, hopefully to give the impression of traffic moving across the bridge, but failing miserably to do so. Obviously, the budget didn't run to a bit of back projection of a real bridge and real traffic. And John Ford was supposedly revered as a great director? Not on the strength of this, he wasn't.
sharejust watched it and liked that copper giving a parking ticket to the inspector ..and then later to the judge LOL
Yes, it's quite funny really. One of the bits of 'special effect' that makes me cringe is the water bursting upwards in 'The Dambusters'. But I guess they had to work with what they had. And I guess John Ford didn't have much of a budget for this film.
shareYes, the bursting dam in "The Dam Busters" was very poorly done, compared with the rest of the film, which was excellent. It's not just that it looks bad now, nearly 60 years later, because I went to see it as a boy in the 1950s and I thought the bursting dam effect was bad even then. It seemed to be a shot of some river rapids filmed from above, then superimposed on the model sky background over the dam. If I had been a special effects technician on the film, I would have told the director that the only way we could make it look real was to blow up a real dam somewhere, or, failing that, don't show the bursting dam at all and have it all happen off screen. Conversely, whoever it was that worked on the special effects for Rank's "Campbell's Kingdom" only three years later, did a superb job of making the bursting dam in that film look very impressive and real.
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