Mistakes in Movies

Citizen Kane (1941)

There’s a scene near the end of Citizen Kane where Kane and his wife through a lavish picnic on the beach in Florida. It’s an unsettling, eerie scene, rendered all the more so by the unusual appearance of their surroundings: it’s more swamp than beach, and those creatures flying across the background don’t quite look like birds…

That’s because they aren’t. This scene reuses a back projection originally created for King Kong (or possibly the sequel, Son of Kong), and the birds are in fact pterodactyls. There are two in the top centre of the frame above, although admittedly they’re easier to make out when they’re in motion. Watch out for them next time you see the movie.

One version of this story has it that RKO warned Welles about the presence of the creatures, and asked him to remove them, but that he decided to keep them in anyway.

If.... (1968)

In a rare moment of escape from the oppressive boarding school in Lindsay Anderson’s If…., Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) and Johnny (David Wood) pay a visit to the local town. In the street, they begin a pretend knife fight.

The scene was filmed from across the road, and the reactions of the passers-by are genuine. One reaction, however, was a little on the extreme side. A passing lorry driver saw the boys, and—despite the fact that they were miming, without actual knives in their hands—he thought the fight was real.

Inspired by a rather peculiar sort of civic responsibility, the man stopped his lorry, ran over to Malcolm McDowell (who appeared to be winning), and hit him on the back of the head with a hammer.

History doesn’t recall whether McDowell required medical attention, or what became of Cheltenham’s have-a-go hero, but at least they got the scene done. (Although not before accidentally capturing a reflection of the camera crew in the windows of a passing bus – see below.)

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones needs to cut a stick to the right length in order to create The Staff of Ra, a doodad that will tell him the secret location of the Ark of the Covenant. Those dastardly Nazis are building their own staff with the help of evil archaeologist Belloq, but when the heroes make their calculations using clues on the staff’s headpiece, Jones realises that the bad guys have got it wrong:

Omar: (Reading the headpiece.) This means six kaddam high.

Sallah: About 72 inches.

Omar: Wait! (Omar turns the headpiece over.) … and take back one kaddam to honour the Hebrew God whose Ark this is.

Indiana Jones: You said their headpiece only had markings on one side, are you absolutely sure? Belloq’s staff is too long. They’re digging in the wrong place!

So if six kaddams make about 72 inches, one kaddam must be 12 inches, or a foot. Therefore, the correct length for the staff is 60 inches, and this makes it only around five feet tall.

However, when we later see Jones carrying it (see the screenshot above), it’s a good foot taller than him, which means that either Indiana Jones is only four foot tall, or somebody in the props department wasn’t reading the script very closely…

(People have tried surprisingly hard to find justifications for the apparent discrepancy: see also the lengthy discussions of the problem on fansite Raider.net.)