I'ma gonna guess this has something to do with developing SONAR, and because I have his name stuck in my head for some reason, I'll say Ronald Reagan.

I don't know if this is it, but I do remember Bing Crosby being involved in some sound tech around then. Can't remember what.

So, no extra credit guess, but: The Bingster.

POO: It seems from your wording that the first stereo movie preceeded the Sandy Hook project -- I would have pegged breaking the stereo barrier later, too.

1940s is too early for a WWII movie, so how about Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy?

According to my sources, the date of the film in question is 1938. And it's one with which you are no doubt familiar.

No right answers yet. Ronald Reagan had nothing to do with anything so real-world, and no crooners were involved. And it wasn't sonar, though it's a logical guess.

Orson Welles?

Bob Hope read Ulysses to the whales and other sealife using Burris-Meyer's pioneering "aquaphone." The fish kill was horrific, and the incident quickly covered up.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Lon Chaney in The Wolfman

The Wizard of Oz

I'm convinced it is some sort of war effort thingee. Maybe trying to fake the noises of an invasion fleet as part of the deception around D-Day. Jimmy Stewart, with the fake invasion noises, in the Atlantic.

Tisn't a davidOsleazenick/ Gone with the Wind / dolby thingy is it?

Scott's on target with the nature of the project -- a WW2 experiment in sonic deception, in this case to simulate a beach landing in the wrong area, though the experiments predated D-Day by two full years.

As for the famous officer...his last film role was in the adaptation of a best-selling horror novel. I never read the book, but remember the movie pretty well.

And as for the sonically innovative film -- lots of good guesses, but none right yet.

Our mystery man, by the way appeared in such films as Love is a Racket, Man Bait, Captured!, It's Tough to Be Famous, and Green Hell. As well as a few more that are perhaps better remembered.

And our mystery film, by the way, seems to be dubbed with a different release date by several different sources (including one I would have thought to be official), but IMDB settles it at 1940. Sorry for implying it was earlier -- apparently it took a long time to make.

The officer's last screen role? Well, I guess our boy was in the armed services.

That rules out Cary Grant, whose last film "Walk, Don't Run" was considered by most not to be a horror film.

I'll say Johnny Weismuller for the movie star.

And for the sound-ariffic movie, How Green Was My Valley.

Neither Cary Grant nor Johnny Weismuller were American, unfortunately.

I'll guess the movie was "Custer's Last Stand", and the sonic innovation Surround Sound.

Is it Alf? Have we ruled out Alf?

Cary Grant became an American right about the time in question. However, his last movie wasn't a horror movie.

Johnny Weismuller wasn't American? Man is my world view shaken.

Hey - I'll go with Paul Robeson, whose rendition of "Ol' Man River" piped through the new sound device actually caused an earthquake.

The man in question was well connected in both the U.S. and Britain-- he had been friends with Britain's Lord Mountbatten before the war, and worked on his HQ staff before returning to work on tactical deception operations in the U.S. navy. He lived throughout his life in both the U.S. and Britain, but was a native-born American -- as was his famous father.

No one's come close to the film in question, which has had a devoted following (it's rated at IMDB in the top 250 films) since its first release.

Lon Chaney, Jr.?

John Barrymore.

James -- gosh, it was James, wasn't it? -- Broderick.

Alas, nothing yet.

Keenan Wynn

One hint -- he played a supporting role in Little Caesar, the film that made Edward G. Robinson famous as a screen gangster.

Baby Jebus

Fred Astaire.

Vincent Price.

Dang - I keep putting people who meet some of the constraints but not all. Although Bill's idea of a father who was 'famous' is probably different than mine.

Knowing nothing but dad was famous, I'll guess Doug Fairbanks. JUNIOR.

Drat, I'm pretty sure Fairbanks is right. So I'll just guess ... uh, Hedy Lamarr, because she really did invent sonar or something, and that's pretty cool.

Boxjam gets it with Fairbanks the younger -- though he had no college education, he wangled a commission in the US Navy reserves, then used his personal connections to go where the action was. After serving on Mountbatten's staff in England, he returned to the U.S. and worked to convince the Navy upper echelons to back programs in "tactical deception" like the one which Burris-Meyer developed. Initially, Burris-Meyer -- one of the sound designers for Disney's sonically innovative film Fantasia* -- was working on a soldier-disabling "sound bomb," but wasn't coming up with anything useful, and switched instead to projects in which recorded sound would be used to fool the enemy. Much of Fairbanks' time during the war was spent on developing these and similar tricks.

Oh, and thanks to nemo for bringing up Hedy Lamarr, who didn't invent sonar, but did come up with the now-widely-applied idea for radio security via "frequency hopping."

Congrats to Boxjam, and hanks all for indulging in a rather messily-defined quiz.

*Walt called Fantasia's sound system "Fantasound," but author Thaddeus Holt's treatise on WW2 deception calls it stereo.

Sonar, of course, was invented by Bob Hope during the drug-happy filming of The Road to Lemuria in 1939 (later radically recut by the panicked studio and released as The Road to Singapore). Hope always claimed that "those goddamn humpback whales" had revealed the secret of sonar to him during a mysterious peyote-inspired midnight fishing excursion off of Honalulu taken by Hope, Bing, and bandleader Les Brown during a break in shooting.

So what was Fairbanks' last movie?

Ghost Story

Baby Jebus has a famous father, Gob, but I guess they weren't American. Sigh, another lie the administration has told us.

If Jebus isn't American, then I'm a monkey-like hominid's descendent!

It's all a bunch of nit-picking anyway, innit?

My late father, John Shorer, during WWII served in the British Army and for a period was in a Sonic Deception Unit. He was there because the method of recording used cine film sound track, and he had been employed in a Film Processing Co prior to the War. He would never talk much about it, but I believe it was used on D-Day to try and convince the German Army that the landings were to take place further North than the proposed landing sites. What he did say was that a cube of speakers were put on to the back of a lorry/truck and the sound then transmitted from these.