Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

The “Colonel Bogey March”, or “theme from the Bridge on the River Kwai” as it’s occasionally mistakenly called, began life in 1914, when it was pseudonymously written by Lieutenant F. J. Ricketts, inspired by a golfer and military man who would apparently give a two-note whistle in place of shouting ‘fore!’. Those two notes provide the beginning of each line of the melody.

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.

The Third Man (1949)

Although The Third Man is (famously) set in Vienna, and makes use of numerous locations around that city, much of the studio work and other shots were filmed in London.

This would apparently include at least some of the back projection footage made for the driving scenes. During the drives to 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’ hat, and on the right of the picture below, even the bus route is tantalisingly close to being legible.

The Odd Couple (1967)

Here’s an onscreen mistake that makes the misplaced apostrophe in The Last Man on Earth look like a huge, movie-wrecking blunder.

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 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.)

Harvey (1950)

In Henry Koster’s 1950 comedy Harvey, James Stewart plays Elwood P. Dowd, a good-natured sort who’s befriended Harvey, a giant invisible rabbit. At least, he seems to be a giant rabbit, by the way that Stewart spends the film looking up at him.

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?