Barnacle Bill 1957

AKA All At Sea (American Title)

Thanks to a reader Andy, who suggested this film might be the subject of the Mystery photographs No: 5 post, I sought out and located a copy to have a look. While none of the scenes in Barnacle Bill match the mystery photos it is an interesting subject none the less as it has some very fine model ship shots in it and it is a title that I was not aware of.

There is a miniature pier which is modeled upon the one which was at Hunstanton in Norfolk where all the daylight exterior live action shots were staged. The real pier was unfortunately destroyed by a storm in 1978.

Along with the pier miniature there is a miniature steam dredger with a working grab. The villains of the movie use the dredger to weaken the pier supports. This results in the front end of the miniature pier splitting off, collapsing and ultimately floating across the channel to France.  All of the miniature sequences are very well staged in an indoor studio tank. The lighting of the night scenes is particularly good and the scenic art backgrounds are also very nicely realised.

Unfortunately I can find no credits for the miniature work.

Miniature figure on a model pedal operated stern paddle wheeled catamaran.

The figure gets a load of dredging mud dumped on him.

All that is left; a miniature axe hanging from the tow line.

San Demetrio London 1943

The movie title is the name of the ship and its registered port which was involved in a true story of miraculous survival early in the second world war.  The crew abandons their burning tanker after it is shelled. One of the lifeboats finds itself back at the burning wreck after several days at sea and the remaining crew decide to re-board her. They eventually put out the fires and decide to make their way to England with the rest of the highly flammable cargo without a compass and without a bridge.  The chief engineer of the real San Demetrio was the adviser on the film which is a pretty captivating and by all accounts an accurate portrayal of the events.

The real San Demetrio after the ordeal.

The film miniature version.

Like in the U.S., the war was a catalyst for U.K. film makers to more fully use miniatures to tell the contemporary war time stories coupled with the fact that real locations and ships had very restricted access. It meant that the quality of miniature work really did improve during the forties. Roy Kellino one of the credited special effects supervisors worked on "Ships with Wings" in 1941 where the miniature work is very 'model looking' in a 1930's kind of way, hampered by depth of field issues and sometimes very studio-bound in the lighting. San Demetrio London made only 2 years later is a vast improvement. Syd Howell the other supervisor was generally known for process work, rear projection etc.

Of course British films and special effects supervisors generally had to make do with much smaller budgets than their Hollywood counterparts, the contrast between the work done here and that seen in my last post "Action in the North Atlantic" both made in the same year, becomes apparent in the scale of the action and the scope of the work. None the less, the miniature work is for the most part pretty impressive. Some of the explosion shots could have used a higher shooting speed to slow down the blasts and give them more weight and the near miss explosions in the ocean are obviously superimposed rather than real detonations in the water.

The story telling more than makes up for the any small quibbles with the miniatures with its heroic depiction of ordinary merchant seamen improvising to survive.

For an account of the real story follow this link John Lewis Jones