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What SFX did they use back in 1970 to achieve this amazing shot?

posted 15 years ago by westley747
13 replies | jump to latest

There's an unforgettable scene in Mike Nichol's Catch 22 involving a crazy pilot flying a light aircraft above all the other characters relaxing on the beach below. The same mad pilot flys into an innocent soldier stood on a harbor and cuts him clean in two before crashing.

I have never forgotten this scene after seeing it on TV as a young kid because of it's scarily realistic depiction of someone being sliced in two by an airplane's wing.

What made this especially memorable was seeing the poor bystander divided in 2 -in a flash you see the the plane's wing take the top of his body off, then a big spray of blood, followed by the remaining bottom half of his torso stay intact and rigid for a second before his knees buckle and he topples into the sea.

This wasn't just some fake human sized dummy that got used - you see the remaining lower half of the torso's legs bend and buckle incredibly realistically in those pre CGI days before he collapses into the ocean.

So how did they achieve this back in 1970? Anyone know ?

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[–] Locomotiva1 15 years ago

Nichols, in the DVD commentary, explained that they used a simple mirror: the actor hold the mirror in front of him to "delete" his upper body.
Nichols recalled that they had to shoot several time to got the mirror in the proper position.

If I remember correctly, he also giggled a bit that he used such a simple optical trick - something dating back from the early film industry, and copied from magician/theatre effects - instead of any strange and "modern" SFX effect.

[–] westley747 15 years ago

Wow. That would explain how they achieved the scene.

Thank you very much Locomotiva1.

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[–] Bry-2 15 years ago

Too bad Hollywood is so reliant now on CGI. It almost ALWAYS looks like an effect shot now (although there is some really seemless CGI in everyday use, of course -- anyone remember the CGI clouds in Sense and Sensibility? Of course not, they looked like normal summertime clouds!)

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[–] thedeadlyspawn79 15 years ago

I remember the scene from the book, but never expected it to be shown on screen, let alone executed as well as it was.

[–] corgi37 15 years ago

And full frontal nudity. dont forget the full frontal nudity!

[–] pazuzu-2 14 years ago

Besides using the mirror, Albert Whitlock had to matte out the areas that got exposed when he fall backwards with the mirror. But the mirror did most of the work.

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[–] DD-931 10 years ago

Just in the interest of accuracy, it wasn't the wing that cut the man in two, it was the propeller. And the pilot didn't crash immediately after, he flew around for a while and then purposely crashed to commit suicide. Amidst all the absurdist moments in the film, this one in a quite disturbing way was absolutely feasible and may well have happened for real during the war.

[–] corgi37 10 years ago

Wow, people dying in a war. How odd.

[–] BobbyDupea 10 years ago

corgi37: the absurdist moment in the movie was not that the guy died. It was that he was killed by his fellow airman in a stunt, and then the flyer who killed the guy killed himself.

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[–] Jerry63 10 years ago

I remember when I first saw this brilliant film how shocking this scene is, and the madness continuing straight after when the pilot who was supposed to be flying the plane tried in vain to explain to the Sergeant that it wasn't him in the crash.

[–] eyeball2055-250-531978 10 years ago

Oddly...even though I saw this film at 15 yrs old when it came out...with my older Brothers and Sisters at a Drive-in and then repeatedly as a Projectionist at another Drive-in at 17yrs old... That particular scene is about the only thing I actually remember so clearly from this film.

The entire Movie is so random and odd that I will have to watch it again to refresh my mind about it! The horror of that scene...coupled with the reactions of the other characters afterwords... has stuck in a corner of my mind for Decades. I have never known exactly how it was done..but now I do. Thank you... the one who replied... for that knowledge!

As a retired Army Soldier and Veteran... I can say that the constant feeling of disconnection and unreality shown by the Soldiers in this War was very close to my own experiences which I have described to some as feeling like being strapped to a Rocket and then shot into the air...not sure where you might land or when or if you will survive the impact. When all of the Baggage we carry with us from day-to-day that seems so important... suddenly just evaporates away with only a singular focus left on those near you and moment-to-moment survival. Nothing makes sense..but you just no longer care...until you come out the other side.

[–] hockeyhrs 10 years ago

As somebody else said, it's the propeller that chops the guy (on the raft) up, not the wing.

I just came from a showing of this movie at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, CA, where Richard Benjamin & Paula Prentiss were special guests and were interviewed before the movie.

Mr. Benjamin gave a detailed description of this scene, and nowhere did he mention the use of mirrors. He said that the dummy was filled with animal innards & blood to simulate the halved corpse of Hungry Joe, and that the airplane had a wire on extended arms (unseen by the audience because the plane is flying away from the camera in the shot) between it's two front wheels, and it was this wire that first slices the dummy in half, so that it's top part can then get chopped up by the propeller. He didn't say how the legs did that wait-for-2-seconds-then-buckle effect, but I'm sure it's not too hard to do if you fill them with the right substance (mass + modulus of elasticity).

[–] pazuzu-2 10 years ago

The scene in done in two cuts. They used the dummy for the first part of the scene, the actual cutting in two. The real person holding the mirror was used for the follow up shot of the lower body falling in the water. It seems Benjamin was only there for the shooting of the first part of the scene.

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