The Sea Wolves 1980

Three miniature ships are blown up at the end of this film by the heroes who employ a smaller vessel also represented in miniature. The submarine shots look like stock footage from another production.

 The Moon City Garbage Agency blogsite has the miniature sequences credited to Wally Veevers, while IMDB just credits him with "opticals".

Glory at Sea AKA Gift Horse 1952

Glory at Sea is the American title, Gift Horse is the original British title.

This film concerns itself with one of the 50 obsolete four funnel American destroyers that were given to Britain in the early stages of the second world war. The title refers to the fact that the ships given their age were prone to breaking down and were not liked by their crews but as the saying goes you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

The miniature work on show here is always pretty dry with no water interaction in sight. For shots of ships on the ocean Wally Veevers was fond of using photo cutouts optically composited onto real ocean plates and there is plenty of that in evidence in this film. In my view this technique is a poor substitute for miniature in a tank and has a lot of shortcomings. Although the copy of the movie I have is very poor in quality, you can clearly make out camera moves in the ocean background plates that don't match the stationary cutouts.

The last half of the film is based on the 1942 St Nazaire raid where the obsolete destroyer, was used to ram and then blow up the only dry dock the Germans had on the Atlantic coast big enough to house the battleships Tirpitz and Bismarck. This subject was again covered in the film Attack on the Iron Coast in 1968 and more recently as a documentary hosted by Jeremy Clarkson that also featured an excellent miniature ship sequence supervised by Jose Granell, then of Cinesite, now of the Magic Camera Company. A very enlightening making of can be found on Youtube.

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Lord Jim 1965

Based on a Joseph Conrad novel this movie adaption some how does not quite add up to the sum of it's parts but none the less has some well staged model ship action. The model is of a clapped out death trap, the coastal freighter Patna, which in a typhoon, leads to the downfall of the hero who then spends the rest of the film trying to atone for his error in judgement.

The typhoon model work is very well shot. The special effects are attributed to two very famous British special effects men Cliff Richardson (the father of John Richardson), who was well known for large scale on set physical effects in the blockbuster movies of the age as well as model work and Wally Veevers known for almost everything to do with visual effects including model work and whose next film after this was Kubrick's 2001 a space Odyssey.