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.

Save

Enigma 2001

There is a 1/5th scale U-boat model featured in this fictional story based on the Enigma code breaking effort going on at Bletchley Park in England during the second world war.

The miniature sequences were supervised by Jose Granell who was then at Mill Film. (This division of the visual effects company The Mill was disbanded around a year later in 2002).

The surface submarine shots are totally convincing, filmed at sea with a real horizon and about the best miniature submarine shots I have seen. The merchant ship models are less successful with the exploding models looking very bare of both detail and  paint weathering. Unfortunately they look like they were made of foam core and were only designed for distant shots but were then employed for close ups.

A miniature fishing boat was also constructed for interaction with the model sub for the end sequence.

Thanks to reader Henry Gee for pointing me to these photographs of the Puck's escape boat miniature.

The submarine model was given to Bletchley Park for outdoor display at the end of the production. Recent photographs appear to show that along with a change in location its original movie paint scheme has been over-painted all in grey primer,and the towing fixture on the bow has been removed.

 Magic camera Company, Jose granells's most recent company (and a re-birth of the company name of legendary miniatures supervisor Derek Meddings of which Jose Granell was an integral part), has some reels and photographs of the submarine in action, the submarine miniature from K19 Widowmaker. along with various other examples of superb model ship work.

Nice model obscured by badly composited CG smoke.