There’s always “Play it again, Sam.” But what other misquotes do you hear, especially the ones that tick you off…
I’ll start. In the movie Cool Hand Luke, the phrase “What we have here is a failure to communicate” is never uttered once. The correct phrase, as spoken by both the Warden and Luke is “(Now)* What we got here is a failure to communicate.” [*In the Warden’s recitation only]
A small error, granted, but, the difference between the grammatically correct “have” and the raw “got,” to me, makes a big difference.
In Star Wars, Obi Wan does NOT say, “May the Force be with you.” HAN says it to Luke when the former is leaving. What Obi Wan says to Luke is, “The Force will be with you,” before he leaves to deactivate the tractor beam.
I don’t know about y’all, but I’ve seen “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something” and “anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something” and one of my friends say it’s “Anyone who says otherwise is a liar or selling something”.
Well, MOST of the famous misquotes are pretty close to the real quotes. But the one that annoys me is…
“We don’t need no steenking badges!”
In “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” a band of Mexican bandits try to take over a gold mine run by Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston. The head bandit claims jokingly that he and his boys are federales (Mexican police). Bogart sarcastically asks to see their badges, and the bandit replies, amiably, “We don’t need no badges.” Then he adds angrily, “I don’t have to show you a stinking badge!”
You’re half right. The warden doesn’t say “a” but Luke does. After watching both scenes, I also notice that neither Luke nor the Warden says “Now” at the start of the quote.
Movie Quotes is a page I found just a minute ago. It gives popular quotes from movies. I can’t vouch for any/all of them. Just a handy way to think of quotes you might have missed.
Interestingly, they attribute the “dirty rat” quote to Taxi, 1932, Cagney but Cagney denies he ever said the line. Guess I’ll have to try the library tomorrow, see if they have a copy.
Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now is often misquoted as saying “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It’s the smell of victory.” The first line is correct, but he never said the second line. The actual quote is much longer:
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn’t find one of ‘em, not one stinkin’ dink body. The smell, you know, that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like - victory.”