I LOVE “CASABLANCA”-but its full of holes: like the letters of transit (signedby General DeGaulle)-that would have been meaningless in Casablanca. One scene I never got-when Rick, Elsa, Paul and Capt. Renault meet at the airport , an officer is talking to the control tower (relaying the weather report)-why isn’t this done by the control tower?And that issue about the evil Nazi officer-he could have ordered Rick arrested and held till he revealed the letters of transit. Who the heck NEEDS letters of transit?.
( reality check on )
My grandmother, father and aunt had to have letters of transit permitting them to leave Germany. They left on a steamer out of Lisbon. They travelled by train to the ocean. This was in 1938, six weeks before Krystallnacht.
Nani hid a gold pocketwatch in my aunt’s underpants, hoping it would not be found. The Nazis did in fact do a compartment by compartment check at the German border. As the sad cliche’ goes, their papers really were in order. My Nani was checked. My father was checked. My aunt was, at the time, three. Not even the soldier was willing to put his hands on her body to poke around.
My brother owns this pocketwatch now.
Not hardly a fabrication of Hollywood, trust me.
( / reality check off )
Not necessarily. Like everybody else, I went to see Jurassic Park because it was supposed to be a really great film, etc., etc., etc. The film quickly went south for me, however, when they were in the trucks riding out to see the dinos for the first time and hop out to get a closer look. I’d worked at an amusement park a few summers before and every ride (with one or two exceptions) was designed so that folks were locked into it, and they couldn’t get out of it without an employee unlocking the door/harness/whatever. For someone working in an amusement park having customers locked into a ride is so hardwired into your system that not seeing it is like seeing someone with feet at the end of their arms. You don’t even have to be paying all that close attention to detail for it to jump out at you. When I saw it, I couldn’t help but think that if they were going to get something like that wrong (I mean, there’s not a liability lawyer on the planet who’d overlook such a thing, and you’d have to have one look over the trucks before they were shipped to the island because the insurance company of the company that converted the trucks would demand it.), what else were they going to screw up? Then came the whole continuity break where a cliff appeared from nowhere and they slid down it and I just said, “Meh. This blows.”
Generally, I only look for gaffe’s when the film I’m watching has such terrible plot/acting/writning, etc. that I need to find something else to keep myself distracted or I’ll start shouting at the screen MST3K-type comments.
What was true in Germany in late 1938 was not necessarily true in Morocco in 1941. Even the screenwriters of Casablanca admitted that they made up the letters of transit as a plot device. From the article on Morocco in the Britannica Student Encyclopedia:
Those aren’t really the types of errors I was referring to.
One is a glaring error to you due to your former career. That’s not nitpicky.
The other annoyed even me - Ms. Mostly Blind to Gaffes/Queen of Suspension of Disbelief, herself. Wasn’t the girl making a HUGE deal over a goat standing there? Right there where the T-Rex just came from? Right there where there is now nothing but a great big cliff? WTF?
I was talking about the nitpicky picks like in the crowd scene of Clash of the Titans some extra was wearing a watch*
*not a real nitpick - I just made that up because I’m too lazy to go find one of the 8 million real nitpicks of this type.