Cinema Eccentricities: Blunders and Inaccuracies.
Some remarkable blunders are perpetrated in the production of some modern films, either due to an oversight on the part of the producer who endeavours to make it too realistic, or inattention to details. These incidents have a tendency to do more harm to the cinema than good, for these little slips which have been allowed to creep in and appear on the screen are apt to make the picture patrons become impatient. Some people find amusement in the noting of all these blunders. Let me enumerate a few to show what I mean, for they are too apparent to escape notice. For instance—
A monk in a picture of the twelfth century is seen to switch off the electric light!
Louis the XIVth is supposed to remark to a lady-in-waiting, that she wants “taking down a peg,” an expression not quite in keeping with the period portrayed!
Again, it is just as ridiculous for vaccination marks to be shown on the left arm of a harem-queen of the East—period, a thousand years ago!
One sees such items as, a view of Curzon Street, showing huge pillared porticoes and palms.
A duke who wears appalling American “reach-me-downs.”
A duchess who is Irish, and therefore must say “Be jabers” and “Begorra.”
Views of English countryside and ducal park, displaying granite boulders, tropical palms and scores of American cars all on the wrong side of the road!
Another delightful oversight—a man who enters a strip of undergrowth wearing a tie, walks straight through and emerges with an up-to-date West End made-up bow, to the old miser in “Wuthering Heights”; the times are Victorian, and a conspicuous object is a safe made in 1915.
One laughs at the absurdity of the whole thing, when a lady in a crinoline is shown knitting a jumper; or a disreputable attic is furnished with a beautifully carved wooden bed, fitted with silken hangings.
Copies of the “Peerage” figure in this satire—of course it is American—and it is such instances which are creating a bad name for the cinema. American ignorance of the British peerage is shown in the film featuring an old Warwickshire family, Armitage by name; a beautiful daughter, the Honourable Diana Gwen Beaufort, etc., Armitage. Her young brother remained the plain unvarnished “Eddie”; her mother “Mrs. Armitage,” and they were apparently not on the same aristocratic level as the Hon. Gwen. A framed copy of the family crest is much to the fore. It is only too noticeable that the Hon. Gwendoline is in direct succession to the family honours, totally excluding her living brother. In the end this captivating young personage marries an ordinary American commoner; the honeymoon is spent at the ancestral home in Warwickshire—Armitage Castle. How, or why she got there the film story does not relate.
Such ignorance causes the public to distrust all films, and does much to lessen the attendance of intelligent people at the cinema theatres.