Rear Projection Scenes

Dianne Foster who played Charlie Drew explained why the movie uses a handful of rear projection scenes that seemed edited into the picture completely out of the blue. Apparently, the high altitude locations resulted in early snow and on-location reshoots became impossible: “Night Passage was a hard picture to do. We started in late autumn and were trying to get out by winter because snowfall would have changed the landscape, so we were on a tight schedule. We had trucks with oxygen masks and cots in them, set up like a mini-hospital… We would do a sequence and then get so winded and exhausted that we’d have to go lay down for a while, get some oxygen and then go back in and finish the scene… the schedule stretched from weeks into months, and in the end we had to shoot some scenes with rear projection in the studio”*