It was originally a tune without lyrics, but people soon began to put words to it. Many informal sets of lyrics exist, but arguably the most famous, and the one that’s being referred to in Bridge on the River Kwai is “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball”.

Hitler has only got one ball,
Göring has two but very small,
Himmler is somewhat sim’lar,
But poor Goebbels has no balls at all!

(Director David Lean had originally wanted the soldiers to be singing the lyrics when they arrived in the camp, but they were considered to be too obscene, so the whistling was a compromise.)

It’s been suggested that these lyrics were originally written as propaganda by Tony O’Brien, who worked for the British Council, and originally had Göring with one ball and Hitler with the two little ones. There’s a huge number of different versions of the song, including extended versions, which are catalogued in dizzying detail on Wikipedia.

As you might imagine, Youtube isn’t exactly short of versions of the song either: see Colonel Bogey March.

This would apparently include at least some of the back projection footage made for the driving scenes. During the drives too and from the hospital near the end of the film, several London buses are visible on the road. (These wouldn’t be the famous Routemasters, though, as those weren’t introduced until the 1950s. They’re more likely to be an earlier model, known as the Regent.)

These kinds of things are often easier to make out in moving footage, but above you can clearly see the outline of a bus behind the brim of Martens’s hat, and on the right of the picture below, even the bus route is tantalisingly close to being legible.

During the opening titles in The Odd Couple, somewhere between Felix Ungar’s failed suicide attempt and his trip to the strip bar, the titles show the copyright year as MCMXLVII – that’s 1947 – as opposed to the correct MCMLXVII (1967).

The transposed L and X, blown up in the image above, must be about as small a goof as is possible to find in a movie, at least until the successor to Blu-Ray starts showing up non-native species of aphid.

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.)

However, Harvey was meant to be 6’3.5″ and Jimmy Stewart himself was 6’3.5″, so he should be looking directly across at him.

In 1990, Stewart recorded an introduction to the film, in which he says that he’d decided that Harvey is actually 6’8″. This wasn’t actually reflected in the script, which is quite firm about Harvey being 6’3.5″, but then again, who’s going to argue with Elwood P. Dowd?

Like a lot of boaty types, the US Navy takes a dim view of mutiny, and they demanded major changes to this story of a mutiny on board a Navy vessel. Without these changes, there would be no Navy approval of the film, meaning no help, and no access to ships or other equipment for filming.

It was only after the novel won the Pulitzer Prize that the Navy began to relent, and even then, the filmmakers had to agree to place a disclaimer at the start of the movie, making it absolutely clear that There has never been a mutiny in a ship of the United States Navy.

This gave the studio the problem of what to do about Humphrey Bogart in the early part of the film. After all, if Parry was going to look like Bogart after the surgery, he couldn’t very well look like him beforehand.

Rather than have another actor play Parry until the surgery, the filmmakers decided to use first-person camera, meaning that we see the world through Parry’s eyes, with the other characters addressing the camera directly, as Lauren Bacall does in the shot below.

As a result, Humphrey Bogart doesn’t appear on screen for almost 36 minutes, and even then his face is covered. The bandages don’t come off for almost an hour, meaning that Bogart’s face is visible for only the last forty minutes of the film.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when Jack Warner at Warner Bros. saw the rushes, he baulked at the idea of paying for a star like Bogart and then using only his voice for the first half of the movie, but by then it was too late.

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 dogs were apparently Hitchcock’s own, although for director’s pets, they weren’t particularly well trained. Despite their fleeting screen time, one of the dogs still finds time to stop and look right at the camera:

Hitchcock had first seen Hedren in a commercial for Sego diet drink (apparently made by a company called Pet Milk – and with a name like that, you can see why they aren’t around any more). There was a shot in that commercial where she turns and smiles in response to a wolf whistle, and Hitchcock decided to reference it here.