Sometimes movies run portions of film backwards, apparently hoping we won’t notice.
Sometimes it’s actually legitimate. Akira Kurasawa opened one of his films (Dodeskaden, I think) with a shot of a train coming into a station, slowing down, and finally stopping with the window centered in the frame, with his subject seated in the seat, who gets up and walks out. It would’ve been practically impossible to arrange to get that perfectly framed shot if you actually filmed the train arriving, but it was relatively easy to do if you started at the stopped train and filmed it leaving the station, then ran the film in reverse. You just have to take great pains to assure that nothing looks out of kilter (such as the woman awkwardly getting up and walking out, since she had to act “backwards”)
The end of the James Bond film You Only Live Twice uses a backwards shot to achieve something impossible, too – the submarine comes up directly under the life raft carrying Bond and his companion. If you actually tried to film that, you’d have a hard time “aiming” the sub to the right position, and an even harder time trying to keep the raft from slipping off the hull as the water ran away. But it was easy to put the raft on the sub and then film it slowly diving. But the illusion is spoiled by the water – water running off the sub viewed in reverse just doesn’t look right.
Sometimes they know the “backwards masking” will be noticed and deliberately use that effect. In the Twin Peaks TV show, David Lynch used such backwards scenes for dream sequences, since it has a weird, otherworldly feel to it. And in the movie Top Secret!, Zucker, Zucker, and Abrahams used it for comic effect, piling gag upon gag, culminating in the lead characters going up a firepole.
But what I’m interested in are cases where they didn’t deliberately intend to shoot backwards, but had to because they needed the shot, or did things wrong, and it was a post-production correction.
They did this in the James Bond film From Russia with Love, in the scene where Rosa Klebb is talking with “Spectre Number One” on his yacht, and she gets up to go look at his tank of Siamese Fighting Fish. I actually never realized that this clip was run backwards until it was pointed out on the “making of…” documentary that came on the DVD of the film.
A more blatant example is in the movie Anaconda, where a waterfall in the background is clearly falling up, and it wasn’t intended as a comic effect. I first saw this film at a Rifftrax screening, where they gleefully pointed it out.
A related case, although not actually running the film backwards, is in another James Bond movie, Diamonds are Forever. Bond is being chased by the Las Vegas police, and comes to an alley too narrow for his car. So he runs the left side of his car up a ramp and balances the car on his two right wheels. Then in a later shot he emerges from the alley on two wheels and allow it to come back down – only the shot shows him on his two left wheels. Evidently nobody noticed that the two stunt scenes didn’t match. They could’ve printed the scenes switched left for right, but then the car would’ve been travelling in the “wrong” direction (going left to right going into the alley, then right to left coming out), which is actually legitimate, but confusing. Worse, all the marquees and street signs would’ve been telltale backwards. So they filmed a shot of the heads of Bond and Tiffany Case showing the car inexplicably rotating from one side to the other. Nobody complained, as far as I know. But then, the film was filled with missing scenes and non-sequiturs, so what was one more in the mix?
Woody Allen’s What’s up, Tiger Lily? has a brief clip where they reverse the film, the way people with 16mm movie projectors often would, for gross comic effect, but that’s pretty obvious and crude.
Got any others?