Captain Horatio Hornblower 1951

This was one of my favorite movies as a kid watching it on TV in the sixties and seventies.  The really excellent miniature work captured my youthful imagination in much the same way as Jason and the Argonauts. The film stands as a textbook on how to stage model ship action with really good scenes under sail and particularly under cannon fire with some really fine destructive splintering of spars and hulls.

The sequence with the miniature French fortifications is particularly noteworthy.

Shot in England, 4 special effects personnel are credited, Harry Barndollar, and Arthur Rhoades, both American and George Blackwell and Cliff Richardson, well known British special effects men. George Blackwell was the miniatures specialist of the group.

According to IMDB Peter Ellenshaw is uncredited for the matte paintings.

Dangerous Passage 1944

Not surprisingly Dangerous Passage is another film that lapsed into the public domain and so can be seen in any number of poor quality formats and freely downloaded from the Internet Archive. It has a very few shots of a model ship in a storm which are very murky due to the poor quality source.

In Search of the Castaways 1962

Another Disney family film from the early sixties, though not quite in the same league as Swiss family Robinson, as it tends to get very silly at times. This time Peter Ellenshaw is credited for Special Photographic Effects and there are a lot of matte paintings in the film, many of which are combined with miniatures. The film also has some model ship scenes which are reasonably effective. The model looks very much like it is the slightly modified and re-painted nitrate ship from Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea made in 1954.

The model in the tank. You can see the top of the backing through the mist.

Peter Ellenshaw Matte painting.

Matte painting above the deck houses, model below.

Miniature cliff collapse, foreground painting.

Miniature Ice bridge collapse.