12 Big Mistakes in Classic Movies That No One Noticed
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A great movie will transport you to a new world and into the lives of its characters, engaging your willing suspension of disbelief. But sometimes when your attention wanders from the story, you notice mistakes that take you out of the narrative— small errors that the filmmakers hoped you’d never noticed or never even noticed themselves. Now, they’re film history, preserved in the final cuts of their movies. Read on for seven classic movie mistakes that may have slipped right past you, even if you’ve unknowingly watched them dozens of times.
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Loew’s Inc.
The biggest movie of all time includes a big historical blunder. As the camera pans over the dead and wounded on a Civil War battlefield, it also pans over a street lamp. While only gas lamps would have been used at the time, some fans see what appears to be the outline of a more modern light bulb inside.
Loew’s Inc.
The Wizard of Oz is a classic that has stood the test of time, but, despite what its biggest fans would say, it’s not perfect. And one blooper that made it into the final version literally diffuses some of the movie’s magic: After terrorizing the Munchkins in an early scene in Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West ( Margaret Hamilton ) prepares to make a grand exit in a ball of red smoke. But if you keep your eyes peeled, you’ll notice that the trap door in the floor through which Hamilton “disappears” starts to open before the smoke effects can fully obscure it.
Paramount Pictures
The iconic noir film Double Indemnity follows an insurance salesman named Walter Neff ( Fred MacMurray ), who is roped into a scheme concocted by one of his beautiful clients, Phyllis Dietrichson ( Barbara Stanwyck ), to kill her husband. Neff is unmarried, which makes him an easy mark for the femme fatale—but MacMurray’s real-life wedding ring is visible in many scenes. He was married to theater and silent film performer Lillian Lamont at the time.
Produzioni Europee Associate
Far in the background of the upper right corner of a scene in which Clint Eastwood’s Blondie and Eli Wallach’s Tuco attach dynamite to the a in the classic Spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly , a car can be spotted driving by. The film is set in 1862, and the automobile would not be invented until 1886. (Also, in the next scene, the pair are completely dry, despite having just been in the river.)
20th Century-Fox
The first Stars Wars film contains one of the most famous movie bloopers ever—perhaps because not many movies have been watched quite so many times by their fans. If you watch closely during the scene in which a group of stormtroopers menace C-3P0 and R2-D2 on the Death Star, you’ll notice that one of them bonks their helmeted head on the top of the door frame as they enter the room.
Paramount Pictures
Indiana Jones is famously no fan of snakes, but he needn’t be too worried about getting bitten—when the confrontation between the adventuring archeologist and a hissing, hooded serpent in Raiders of the Lost Ark was filmed, the snakes were kept safely in a glass tank. However, in the original release of the first movie in the franchise (as well as early VHS releases), you could actually see the snake reflected in the glass as Marion Ravenwood ( Karen Allen ) appeared to gape at it from only inches away. Unfortunately the blooper has been digitally scrubbed from the DVD and Blu-ray release, but the legend lives on.
Buena Vista Pictures Distribution
Hopefully you were swooning too hard over the romantic chemistry between Edward ( Richard Gere ) and Vivian ( Julia Roberts ) in Pretty Woman to notice a silly goof during their cozy breakfast the morning after their first night together. Vivian nibbles at a croissant as Edward reads the newspaper, but when the camera cuts back to her, she’s suddenly holding a pancake with a single perfect bite out of it.
MGM
One extra in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller North by Northwest was notably prepared for what the scene entailed—perhaps too prepared. In the background of the scene in which Eva Saint Marie’s Eve Kendall shoots Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill with blanks in front of a crowd at the Mount Rushmore Visitor Center, a little boy can be spotted sticking his fingers in his ears to muffle the sound of the prop gun.
Paramount Pictures
Jack Dawson ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) is clearly nervous when Rose Dewitt Bukater ( Kate Winslet ) asks him to draw her wearing only the priceless “Heart of the Ocean” necklace given to her by her brutish fiancé Cal ( Billy Zane ) in Titanic . One major clue? When he instructs her to “lie on that bed, uh, I mean couch.” This wasn’t scripted but was rather a flubbed line by DiCaprio . Director James Cameron liked what it brought to the scene, however, so the slip-up stayed.
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Warner Bros. Pictures
At the end of Goonies , Data ( Ke Huy Quan ) makes reference when he’s recapping the gang’s adventures for a reporter to a threat they never encountered. But his line “The octopus was really scary!” isn’t Data exaggerating events. In a scene that was deleted from the final cut, the Goonies are actually attacked by an octopus. The line stayed even though the sequence went, making Data’s comment a non sequitur to anyone not well-versed in Goonies lore.
Warner Bros.
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining , there’s a nice wide establishing shot of the Overlook Hotel. Don’t study it too closely though, or you’ll notice that there’s no sign on the grounds of the hedge row maze where the climax of the film takes place.
Miramax Films
Despite Pulp Fiction being a nonlinear narrative, the bullet holes in the wall behind Vincent ( John Travolta ) and Jules ( Samuel L. Jackson ) when they come to retrieve Marcellus’ ( Ving Rhames ) briefcase are not a clue—they’re just a continuity error. They show up before the two characters are shot at, so take them as an omen, if you like.
30 Travel Movies to Help Inspire Your Next Trip
Sony Pictures Releasing
One of the great things about movies is that they can take you places without you having to squeeze into an uncomfortable airplane seat or with all the other hassles that real-life travel entails. There are lots of great movies about people setting out to see the world , so let the big screen scratch your wanderlust by checking out these 31 films.
Some of the movies on this list are romantic, following two people as they come together in that special way that happens when you’re away from home. Others are about journeys of self-discovery, showing what can happen when you hit the road solo. Some movies are uproarious comedies that will transport you away from your troubles as you laugh along to the antics on screen. There are also movies that are less of a vacation than they are an adventure, sure to get your blood pumping. And there are some scary movies about travel—the sort that might make you think, “You know, actually, maybe let’s make this one a staycation.”
Don’t bother packing your bags. All you need to do is hit “play” to embark on any one of these 30 great travel movies.
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Romantic Travel Movies
Diane Lane stars in this charming 1996 movie as a recently divorced woman who travels to Italy in an attempt to break out of her post-divorce funk. (In her defense, her husband was cheating on her and he got to keep the house, so she’s right to be miffed.) Once in Tuscany, though, she somehow becomes the owner of a villa, and as she begins to make a new life for herself, the potential for new love emerges amidst some of the most beautiful scenery and delicious-looking wine ever put to film. It’s the type of movie that will have you looking up flights to Florence.
A destination wedding counts as travel, and the breakout comedy of 2023 was shot on location in Australia. Glenn Powell and Sydney Sweeney play two people who left on bad terms after a one-night stand only to have to make nice when their mutual friends get married. Anyone But You is enough to make you want to take a trip Down Under, although perhaps without all the rom-com shenanigans.
Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz play lovelorn women who swap homes so that they can get away from their respective heartbreaks over Christmastime. When Winslet’s Iris and Diaz’s Amanda get to Los Angeles and London, respectively, they find new love in Jack Black and Jude Law’s characters. The 2006 movie, from the great Nancy Meyers , works extra well as a travel movie because, thanks to the house-swapping premise, it’s a reminder that everyone’s home is somebody else’s trip.
The first of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy introduces audiences to Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Céline as they meet on a train from Budapest and decide to spend the night together wandering Vienna. Widely regarded as one of the more romantic movies ever made, Before Sunrise will also make you want to explore Vienna with someone you’ve just met—someone who maybe you could see yourself spending the rest of your life with.
Technically, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is a travel movie (because Owen Wilson’s character is visiting Paris with his fiancee, played by Rachel McAdams ) and a time travel movie (because he goes back in time to 1920s). It’s a romantic movie both because of the relationship Wilson’s Gil strikes up with Marion Cotillard’s Adriana and because of how it romanticizes Paris and nostalgia—and deftly interrogates that romanticism.
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Movies About Traveling Solo
Dev Patel stars in this 2016 film, which is based on the true story of Saroo Brierley , who was separated from his parents in India at a very young age and adopted by an Australian couple. Once he grew up, he went back to his birth country in an attempt to find his biological parents. Saroo’s trek through India and into his own forgotten past is a tear-jerking, emotional travel story, and Lion was rewarded with six Oscar nominations.
This 2014 adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail stars Reese Witherspoon as Strayed sets out to hike from Southern California to Washington State in an attempt to find herself. The tour of the West Coast’s trails is a tour-de-force for the actor as her character remakes her life one hiking boot-clad step at a time.
In 1977, Robyn Davidson set out on a nine-month journey across the unforgiving Australian Outback with her dog and four camels. She later wrote about her adventure in National Geographic and in her memoir Tracks . In 2013, her story was adapted into a film with the same name. Mia Wasikowska plays Davidson in the movie, which features stunning cinematography of the Australian desert in all its harsh beauty.
A lot of solo travel stories are tales of self-discovery where the voyager has learned something by the time they reach their destination. Into the Wild offers no such catharsis, instead telling the true story of Christopher McCandless , a man who hiked across America and eventually ended up in the Alaskan wilderness—an environment he was not prepared for. It’s a poignant, tragic counterpart to the more common celebrations of wanderlust you tend to see in pop culture.
Julia Roberts stars as Elizabeth Gilbert in this 2010 adaptation of her memoir of post-divorce travel and self-discovery. Feeling her life is aimless and without purpose, Liz elects to travel around the world, stopping in Italy, India, and Bali where she eats, prays, and well, you can probably guess.
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Travel Horror Movies
Ari Aster’s supremely disturbing folk horror movie stars Florence Pugh as a young woman who is begrudgingly invited by her not-great boyfriend and his friends to go to Sweden to observe a commune’s midsummer festival. Upon getting there, Pugh’s Dani soon learns that the Hårga are not all sunshine and flowers, and that there are dark rituals and sinister plots. It’s the type of movie that will make you think twice about a Nordic vacation, and you’ll never look at a taxidermied bear the same way.
This 2005 horror movie, from director Eli Roth , is one of the biggest examples of the so-called “torture porn” subgenre, but there’s more to Hostel than just blood and guts. (There are a lot of blood and guts, though.) The film follows some American backpackers who, while traveling in Eastern Europe, become the victims of a shadowy organization that lets the ultra-rich live out their most depraved fantasies by torturing and killing unsuspecting tourists. Let’s just say that Hostel is not exactly a great promotional tourism campaign for Slovakia—something that the country was actually pretty upset about .
This 2022 film, released by the horror-centric streaming service Shudder, follows a social media influencer who, when traveling in Thailand, meets and befriends a young woman. It’s the type of movie that lives or dies on its twists, but let’s just say that Influencer is what you would get if The Talented Mr. Ripley were set in the social media age and a full-on horror film instead of a thriller.
The Creator director Gareth Edward’s 2010 debut follows a photojournalist as he tries to escort a young woman through Mexico, which has been taken over by kaiju-sized alien monsters. There are moments of beauty and discovery along their journey, as well as high-stress moments of terror when they encounter these creatures, which Edwards brings to life on a shoestring budget—though you can’t tell that by watching.
It’s right there in the title: John Landis’ 1980 comedy horror is about an American in London, although he’s not a werewolf when he first arrives in the UK. No, that happens after he’s mauled by a strange beast in the moors of Yorkshire—and that same beast kills the friend he was backpacking with. When he recovers in London, things get gnarly in the light of a full moon.
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Comedy Movies About Traveling
If you like the misadventures of the Griswold family’s first vacation attempt, great news: There are five sequels to this 1983 Chevy Chase comedy. Before the European , Vegas , or Christmas Vacation , though, Clark Griswold tries to drive his family from Chicago to southern California. Their journey makes for some classic comedy, though it might hit a bit too close to home if you’ve had to endure a family vacation that went awry.
A lot of Wes Anderson’s movies are about travel, including his most recent film, Asteroid City , and The Grand Budapest Hotel . His ultimate travel movie, though, is 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited , which stars Owen Wilson , Adrien Brody , and Jason Schwartzman as three estranged brothers who agree to make a trip through India together in the hopes of reconnecting after their father’s death.
Lots of movies are about travel, but are they about a big adventure, the way Tim Burton’s directorial debut is? Paul Reubens stars as his Pee-wee Herman character, who hits the road in an attempt to recover his beloved bicycle, which has gone missing. Following a psychic’s totally legit vision of his bike in the basement of the Alamo, Pee-wee encounters a ghost trucker, biker gangs, and all the madness of a Hollywood backlot.
Netflix’s Oscar-nominated animated movie has a setup that’s not too dissimilar from that of National Lampoon’s Vacation . Aspiring filmmaker Katie Mitchell can’t wait to get away from her family and start film school. Her dad, voiced by Danny McBride , feels his daughter slipping away and opts to have the whole fam drive her across the country rather than take a plane to school. At the same time, an A.I. gone rogue has started a robot uprising. Oops!
In addition to featuring a hall-of-fame cameo from Matt Damon as the singer of “Scotty Doesn’t Know,” Eurotrip is a classic, if not especially intelligent, teen sex romp. It’s not the movie to watch if you want to get a feel for Europe, but it is what you put on when you want to enjoy some good, dumb laughs.
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Adventure Travel Movies
Ben Stiller directed and stars in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty , an imaginative adaptation of a 1939 short story about a mild-mannered man who gets lost in his daydreams. When circumstances force Walter to embark on a trip around the world, he starts living his daydreams for real, going to Greenland and the Himalayas. Featuring a fantastic soundtrack and gorgeous cinematography of some truly beautiful, off-the-beaten-path places, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is the type of movie that might make you stop just thinking about taking a trip and actually buy a ticket.
William Friedkin , best known for directing The Exorcist , also helmed this 1977 thriller about possibly the worst road trip of all time. When four people, all on the run from their various sordid pasts, find themselves trapped in a remote oil village in Colombia, they are desperate to get out by any means necessary. The opportunity presents itself when the bosses need people to drive boxes of dynamite that are extremely unstable and could blow at any minute across miles of rainforest. There is one sequence in Sorcerer that’s some of the most unbelievably tense filmmaking you’ll likely ever see. (Note that it’s a remake of another classic film, Wages of Fear , should you want another movie that’ll keep you on edge.)
Johnny Depp stars as an average man who finds himself smack in the middle of an international criminal incident when on vacation in Europe after a woman, played by Angelina Jolie , tries to trick the authorities into thinking Depp’s the fugitive they’re looking for. Thrills, laughs, and a little romance ensue.
Charlie Hunnam plays real explorer Percy Fawcett in this adaptation of the book by the same name from author David Grann , who also wrote Killers of the Flower Moon . The film follows the British explorer in the early 1900s as he tries, time and time again, to prove the existence of a mythical city deep in the jungles of Brazil. Think of it as a somber, reflective take on a real-life Indiana Jones, one whose obsession with traveling to hostile environments in search of knowledge may prove to be his undoing.
This gripping survival drama about the infamous 1996 Mount Everest Disaster, as documented by Jon Krakauer in the book Into Thin Air, is the type of film that will probably make you consider an all-inclusive beach resort for your next vacation rather than mountain-climbing.
RELATED: 25 Movies Like Knives Out That Will Bring Out Your Inner Detective .
Movies About Roadtrips
This biopic follows the man who would become the Che Guevara when he, as a young man in the early ‘50s, travels across South America with his friend Alberto Granado . The film, which is based on Guevara’s trip diary, is both a road movie and a coming-of-age film about an important historical figure, as we see him become radicalized by the poverty and inequality he sees on this journey.
Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan star in Ethan Coen’s romp from earlier this year, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call Drive-Away Dolls “ The Big Lebowski , but just the silly parts.” Set in the late ’90s, it follows two lesbian friends who learn that the car they’ve rented has a human head and a briefcase in the trunk—and that some shadowy types really, really want whatever’s in that case back.
Burt Reynolds stars in this 1977 classic, which was the second-highest-grossing movie of its release year after the original Star Wars . He plays a legendary bootlegger who accepts a job to smuggle 400 cases of Coors from Texarkana to Atlanta in under 28 hours. Along the way, he encounters a runaway bride played by Sally Field , and Sheriff Buford T. Justice, who wants to stop the Bandit. Smokey and the Bandit also features an incredible theme song, “ East Bound and Down ,” and while the lyrics describe the plot of the movie almost beat-for-beat, you’ll find that it’s a fitting song to blast on your own car stereo when you’re on the road.
Il Sorpasso , which is sometimes given the English title The Easy Life , is a masterpiece of 1960s Italian cinema. It follows a boisterous middle-aged man who decides to take a timid, bookish college student he meets under his wing for a good time out on the road—whether or not the younger man actually wants to tag along or not. Hilarious and poignant when you might not expect it, Il Sorpasso ’s well worth the watch.
This seminal adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s novel of the same name stars Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro as they drive to Sin City under the influence of an absurd amount of drugs. In that way, it’s the ultimate travel movie. It’s about a trip, but it’s also about a trip .
