Book Review: 'Roman Soldiers Don't Wear Watches: 333 Film Flubs - Memorable Movie Mistakes'

(C) 2000  Carol Publishing Group 

Roman soldiers, as we all know, didn't wear watches at the height of the Caesars' power. Not because they couldn't afford even an inexpensive digital watch, mind you, but simply because the watch -- heck, even the mechanical clock -- hadn't yet been invented. Yet, as Bill Givens will cheerfully point out in his extremely amusing (and for some film producers, dismaying) collection of film flubs, some ancients were way ahead of themselves. Modern watches, wedding rings and other anachronisms make their little unexpected cameos in such set-in-ancient-times epics as The Ten Commandments, The Viking Queen, and Spartacus.

Givens' Roman Soldiers Don't Wear Watches: 333 Film Flubs -- Memorable Movie Mistakes is a compilation of continuity errors, slips of dialogue, film-flipping flaws, and other unexpected mistakes that often pop up during production. Some of them have been published in other volumes of his successful "Film Flubs" series, but quite a few are new.

Many moviegoers are by now familiar with some of the realities of filmmaking, such as the fact that films are shot out of sequence, that many "takes" of a scene are shot, and thousands of feet of film are cut and spliced together in an editing room. Much care is taken to make sure the movie's final cut tells the story properly and that the scenes have no distracting flubs, but quite often things do slip by, even in movies that are considered among the very best, including Casablanca, Star Wars, Dances with Wolves, Pretty Woman, and Scent of a Woman.

Not every gripe is about honest mistakes (such as Mark Hamill's calling Princess Leia "Carrie" near the end of A New Hope -- chalk that one up to overexcitement in the actor's part and a temporary lapse in the sound editor's) or silly anachronisms such as a wristwatch on a Roman soldier's wrist in 44 BC. Some are careless lapses in attention to detail, as in The Sound of Music when the Von Trapps are fleeing from Austria to escape the Nazis. Instead of heading toward Switzerland and freedom, they are driving north, straight toward Germany. Some are accidental "cameos" by crewmembers -- such as the guy with the handheld camera in 1989's The Fabulous Baker Boys, glimpsed as the brothers fight after a fake telethon. Others are even worse, such as setting a film's scene in one season while it is quite clearly another.

Although most of the entries in this book are short -- often introduced with bon mots such as "How's That Again, Sam?" and "Is a Bird Bath the Fountain of Youth?" -- Givens does scrutinize big crowd pleasers (Apollo 13, Terminator II, Jurassic Park) in chapters with the heading Picking on the Biggies. Here Givens has great fun pointing out flubs (such as wrong markings on the Saturn V rocket in Apollo 13, wrong dates and even the premature existence of USA Today in Forrest Gump, and just about everything in Kevin Costner's Robin Hood: The Prince of Thieves) in some big moneymakers and/or critical darlings.

Some of the strangest flubs, such as the switch in direction of the "blood" on young Indy's chin in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or attacking birds without shadows in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, are shown in black and white photos.

Givens, who is an entertainment reporter and TV writer, clearly has a love for the movies in general, so none of this is written with any mean-spiritedness or malice. Like Damien Boma in Starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan, his approach is lighthearted and funny while at the same time being factual. His intended audience is not, of course, the Hollywood insider or the technical expert. Rather it is for the average filmgoer who loves the medium yet spots such bizarre little things as California license plates in a movie that's set in Illinois (1978's Halloween) or a crewmember's hairy arm where none should be (Butterfield 8).