Props in Movies
Notes and fact on some of the objects seen in films.
Brighton Rock (1947)
In Brighton Rock, just before gangster Pinkie Brown goes to record his charming gramophone message for new wife Rose, we see Rose operating a slot machine.
The machine, apparently (and logically) called ‘The Bell Ringers’, was operated by dropping in an old English penny, and played a short mechanical performance of figures in a church ringing bells.
‘The Bell Ringers’ was designed by German Charles Ahrens, a well-known name in the world of penny arcades. His model ‘The Executioner’ turned up in The Wench is Dead, an episode of Inspector Morse.
These moving models are now highly collectable, and there are several museums that specialise in them. National Jukebox have restored a broken-down Bell Ringers, and there’s a short video of it in action below.
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The opening scroll from The Maltese Falcon is, sadly, completely made up. There was no real Maltese falcon, although the idea may have come from another magnificent bird, the Kniphausen Hawk, which was made in 1697 for a Count of the Holy Roman Empire.
The Kniphausen Hawk certainly fits the bill – or should that be beak? – being made of precious metal and encrusted with rare jewels. It’s silver rather than gold, though, and a good deal more lively than the falcon. The Kniphausen Hawk is part of the collection at Chatsworth House, and there’s a photograph of it here.
Several prop falcons were made for the movie, and these are themselves worth a fortune. There are two lead falcons known to exist, one of which sold in 1994 at auction for $398,500, and there’s at least one original prop made of resin. It’s often possible to tell which version is on screen at any given moment, as long as somebody’s holding it: the lead falcons weighed more than 20 kilos each!
Aside from the authentic prop falcons, there’s also a healthy trade in replica falcons of varying quality. Of these replicas, the most accurate one-off must be the one made by propmaker & Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage. He discusses the process, and a great deal more about the history of the falcon prop, in the video below. (First he talks about reconstructing a Dodo skeleton. It’s very interesting in its own right, but skip to 6:25 if you’re in a hurry and want the falcon story.)
Local Hero (1983)
The iconic red telephone box featured in Bill Forsyth’s 1983 comedy Local Hero was just a prop: the tiny town of Pennan in Aberdeenshire didn’t actually have a phone box.
There’s nothing unusual about that, but in this case, life soon followed art as film fans and tourists lobbied BT to install one. And so they did, although in a slightly less dramatic position than the film’s booth. (See below for a slightly skewed shot of the real box from Google Street View.)
At least BT got their money’s worth: according to aboutaberdeen.com, the phone box is now the most called booth in Scotland, due to tourists calling friends and family and getting them to call back.
The phone box’s iconic status almost came about by chance. The final shot of the phone box was inserted as a result of what director Bill Forsyth called ‘benign studio pressure’ for a more upbeat ending. Forsyth rejected various ideas for reshot final scenes, and finally came up with the idea that’s used; the shot itself was salvaged from the cutting room floor.
The Ladykillers (1955)
The original 1955 Ealing film of The Ladykillers featured Alec Guinness as the leader of a band of robbers who find their plans scuppered by Mrs Wilberforce, an elderly widow. Alec Guinness also appears in a second, minor role in the film.
There’s a photograph on Mrs Wilberforce’s wall of her late husband, a captain who went down with his ship 29 years before. The picture is actually of Alec Guinness in his role as The Admiral in the earlier film Kind Hearts and Coronets (see below)—although you’ll notice that they must have doctored the portrait in order to reduce his rank.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
About twenty-five minutes into Kubrick’s 2001, during the gravity-free shuttle ride, there’s a great special effect: a loose pen, floating through the air.
Apparently it took them a long time to get this shot right: any kind of messing about with bits of wire just wouldn’t have looked realistic. The effect was finally achieved by sticking the pen to a large sheet of glass, and slowly rotating the glass in front of the camera.
When you’re watching the movie, if you look carefully, you can see the very slight resistance when the airline hostess picks the pen ‘out of the air’, and it detaches from the glass.
