Photographic goofs in westerns

[Drayton Calhoun]

I remember watching Desperado, not the one with Antonio Banderas, where the hero, Duell McCall I think his name was, knocks a baddie off the back of a horse with a Henry and you can see the cable attached to the baddie's belt and one episode of Wanted Dead or Alive where Randall rides into an abandoned fort and you can see tire tracks from a truck in the dirt.

[The Elderly Kid]

In "The Wild Bunch" the gang pause on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande before crossing into Mexico. It's flowing from their left to their right. That's the wrong direction.

[WaddWatsonEllis]

In one of the spaghetti westerns, I believe with Clint Eastwood, there is a shot looking up from his feet for a second or two. But in that second or two there are the contrails of a four engine jet in the sky ....

[Advertising]

[Drayton Calhoun]

One of my favorites, which has happened in several movies and tv shows, is someone chambering a round in a Winchester before a fight, oh, at least twice. I know it is for added dramatic effect, of course when you never run out of ammo...

[Delmonico]

About any movie made in Monument Valley.

[Short Knife Johnson]

That is the part about making movies that drives most filmakers nuts.  Very few films are shot, or can be shot in sequence due to locations, weather, budgets, scheduling, having to do pick-up shots due to later strokes of genius or lost film, etc...  They take the raw footage and then really start to make their movie.  I partook in a SIMPIA Set Safety/Set Protocol course some years back.  The guy teaching it said "There is a always an excellent movie in every pile of film.  There is also a crappy movie in that same pile of film.  The difference is in the editing... except for Waterwold."    He also said that period pieces are the worst due to having to fight against the modern world.

There are bound to be inconsistencies in all movies for whatever reasons, but yeah, sometimes there are no excuses.  I like to listen to the commentaries and how some of the goofs happen or what they did to cover them up.  CGI, or lighting, or the writing of a new scene.  In Young Guns II, the knife fight at the burial ground was written because Lou Diamond Phillips had broken his arm in a fall from a horse.  To keep the story consistent rather than stop production, the fight was a pick-up scene were Chavez y Chavez was stabbed through the forearm and explained why his arm was heavily bandaged.

[Forty Rod]

Not western, but one that just drives me NUTS is in Independence Day when Will Smith is leaving to go fight the aliens.  He's with his girlfriend and her kid out by his car and the ends of the epaulettes on his uniform blouse are under the collar, over the collar, under the collar, over the collar, under...well, you get the idea. Every time the angle changes, so do those epaulette tips.

[Old Doc]

In one of the spaghetti westerns, I believe with Clint Eastwood, there is a shot looking up from his feet for a second or two. But in that second or two there are the contrails of a four engine jet in the sky ....

Don't know if we are thinking of the same film but the one I saw was with Kris Kristoferson staring down at a bad guy in the dirt and then you see the bad guy's view looking up at Kristoferson and there are contrails in the sky.

[Old Doc]

Not a western but how about the Hitchcock film, North by Northwest. There's a scene in the visitors center at Mt. Rushmore, where Eva Marie Saint is firing a gun at Cary Grant. In the background, is a cafeteria, where people are eating. If you look close you'll see a boy about 12-13, who has his back to the actors but has apparently been through several takes. As Eva Marie Saint pulls out the gun and before she fires it, the boy puts his fingers in his ears.

[Coal Creek Griff]

These are more continuity mistakes, but I find them interesting.

In the newer "3:10 to Yuma", there are a number of mistakes.  One of my favorites is when Charlie Prince is confronting the railroad workers in the tunnel ("Are you some kind of posse?").  The badge on one guy's lapel keeps changing sides (left lapel, right lapel, left lapel).  

Charlie then draws his two Schofields and shoots two of the railroad guys by crossing his arms in front (right gun shooting the left guy, left gun shooting the right).  The camera cuts to another angle and Charlie is holding his guns pointed out to his sides (right gun to the right, left to the left).  There are more, but those are in the same scene.  I just can't imagine how they could get the badge thing wrong, though.  Do they keep unpinning the badge between takes?  If they had to take it off, didn't they think about which side it was on?

CC Griff

[The Elderly Kid]

There are "continuity" people who are supposed to keep track of these things. But sometimes new footage has to be shot (or reshot) for a scene, perhaps months later when doing the final cut. The whole crew may be different people and the actor himself has probably forgotten which side the badge was on.

[Old Doc]

Check out the movie, Patton. In almost every photo I have seen of the real General Patton, when he was wearing both his Colt Single Action and his S&W .357 Magnum, the Colt is on the right side. In the opening scene in front of the flag, he has the S&W on his right hip and the SA on his left hip. Later in the movie they are reversed. This means the prop people had to have both a right and a left holster for each gun. Why?

[Harley Starr]

Don't know if we are thinking of the same film but the one I saw was with Kris Kristoferson staring down at a bad guy in the dirt and then you see the bad guy's view looking up at Kristoferson and there are contrails in the sky.

The Tracker.
1988.
One of my favorites.
There are contrails aplenty in that movie.
I hate to say it but maybe their filming schedule didn't allow them the time to avoid that.

[AlaskaJack]

I remember watching one of the episodes of Bonanza when I was in high school.  On the horizon of the blue sky was a jet contrail...

[The Elderly Kid]

There was a time when directors with real clout could fix this. When Cecil B. DeMille was in Egypt filming "The Ten Commandments," he got the whole Egyptian airforce grounded for days while he was shooting the big Exodus scenes (the only scenes with extended sky views) so that there would be no contrails.

[Old Doc]

Saw a good one this week, I think on The Virginian. This particular character is shot in the left shoulder. They take him to the doc who makes a big production of digging the bullet out and having the pretty blonde assistant hold pressure on the bandage. The wounded man is lying in bed with his shirt off and talking to others in the room. They alternate back and forth several times, showing him from two different camera angles. When they show him from the right side, the girl is holding pressure on the bandage. When they show him shirtless from the front, he doesn't have a mark on him. No bullet wound, no bandage, and the girl is not touching him . Miraculous recovery.

[kcub]

The Hills Run Red

probably the cheesiest spaghetti western of all

there's one scene where an ambush is set up where the good guys are shooting down at the bad guys in a canyon

a whole lot of one-bullet-kills-both-horse-and-rider shots 

[Durango Flinthart]

I can remember watching Bonanza as a child with my family and laughing at the fact that from one scene to another the spots on Little Joe's saddle pony would "roam around."  

[buffalo bill]

I remember an episode of "The Cisco Kid" where during the old "goodguy jumps off a rock on to the badguy as he rides past routine" a big white car drives across the screen in the background. I was probably 10 or 12 and I saw it ,never could figure out why the editting staff didn't see it . Looking back they probably thought that everyone would be concentrating on watching Cisco get the baddie That being said, it was these poorly made big and small screen gems that were partly responsible for us being on this forum today. LONG LIVE COWBOYS!

[Rube Burrows]

Was watching Lonsome Dove the series and on disk three "The Road Home" in the scene where the Indians jump Newt and steal his gunbelt. As the Indians are riding off one of the Indians is holding his rifle by the receiver over his head and shaking it. You can clearly see its a rubber gun. Its wobbling and flexing like you would not believe.