Best Special Effects, 1941

Awards presented February 26, 1942

The practice of having studios submit their own nominees continued to be problematic. Not only were the minor studios like Republic and Monogram submitting some fairly implausible nominations, but in this category Warner Bros. seemed to be trying to pull a fast one, though it may just have been the victim of a clerical error: When the nominations were announced on February 9, 1942, the studio's nominee was Dive Bomber, but as the Academy's own notation on its official list of nominations says, "sometime between the 10th and the 19th of February, this title was dropped and replaced by another Warner Bros. production, The Sea Wolf, with the same people credited for the nomination. There is no explanation in the files as to why this replacement was made."

The nominees were ... 

• Aloma of the South Seas, photographic effects by Farciot Edouart, Gordon Jennings; sound effects by Louis Mesenkop  
• Flight Command, photographic effects by A. Arnold Gillespie; sound effects by Douglas Shearer
• I Wanted Wings, photographic effects by Farciot Edouart, Gordon Jennings; sound effects by Louis Mesenkop
• The Invisible Woman, photographic effects by John Fulton; sound effects by John Hall
• The Sea Wolf [see note above], photographic effects by Byron Haskin; sound effects by Nathan Levinson
• That Hamilton Woman, photographic effects by Lawrence Butler; sound effects by William H. Wilmarth
• Topper Returns, photographic effects by Roy Seawright; sound effects by Elmer Raguse
• A Yank in the R.A.F., photographic effects by Fred Sersen; sound effects by E.H. Hansen

And the Oscar went to ... 

I Wanted Wings, photographic effects by Farciot Edouart, Gordon Jennings; sound effects by Louis Mesenkop.

Farciot Edouart

Gordon Jennings

What was just a routine action-romance became timely with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Directed by Mitchell Leisen, the film has little to recommend it other than that it served as a breakthrough for Veronica Lake. It also starred Ray Milland and William Holden. For the most part, the effects don't seem so special today, blending rear-screen photography (a specialty of Edouart's) and matte shots with miniatures (Jennings's forte), and aerial photography by Elmer Dyer, but there is a spectacular crash near the end of the film. Edouart was the head of the Paramount special effects department and a winner of ten awards from the Academy, most of them for scientific and technical developments. Jennings won two Oscars and received seven more nominations. Mesenkop was a Paramount sound recordist from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s.