With the fifth—and no doubt final—Indiana Jones movie now in production despite some unfortunate setbacks, it’s a great time to bust out the original three films and see where the magic first began. The third film in the franchise is renowned for having a great story, not to mention a perfect pairing between Harrison Ford and the late Sean Connery in one of his wackiest roles.
While movies of this scale are a remarkable achievement, they aren’t perfect. Littered throughout the captured footage is a host of hilarious and unintentional errors that got past the filmmakers. It’s impossible to catch them all, but it’s also quite fun to point out the funniest of the lot.
Indy Still Isn’t A Believer
For all the things Indiana Jones has seen in his travels, he remains remarkably pragmatic. This is the same man who saw the infamous power of the Kali blood rituals, the restorative magic of the shivalinga stones, and the destructive power of the Ark of the Covenant, all before he’d gone searching for the Holy Grail.
Yet, he still clings to the notion that it’s all just a bunch of hooey, as his Star Wars counterpart Han Solo would have said. This is a rather large goof that ended up getting repeated in Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Either Indy is in the advanced stages of chronic denial, or he’s the world’s most notorious gaslighter.
The Changing Of The X
Inside the library, Indy, Elsa, and Marcus attempt to solve a quick riddle to discover the hidden location of an ancient catacomb system built underneath. Indy eventually works it out and climbs a staircase to locate the site of the entrance point, hidden there in plain sight with a gigantic Roman X numeral.
Unfortunately, the consistency of the X changes in between shots. At the top of the staircase, the X is set against a predominantly bright-colored background, but, in the next shot, the tiling matches the dark green of the surrounding materials, and the X itself is much harder to make out.
Whoops, There It Is
When Indy and Elsa descend into the catacombs underneath the library, they discover all manner of ancient markings, relics, and a bevy of human skulls built into the stonework. It’s an appropriately creepy and awe-inspiring scene that also features a fun Ark of the Covenant nod to the original Raiders of the Lost Ark.
After discovering this particular marking, the scene shifts to another wall where Indy holds up a lighter. For a brief movement above his head, the shadow of a crew member’s boom mic can be seen before it quickly lifts out of view. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but it’s an interesting little goof, nonetheless.
Flame Discrimination
While exploring the catacombs underneath the library, Indy stumbles upon a wall marked with an X and breaks through it with a shoulder charge. Behind the wall is a vast network of secondary catacombs, along with a ton of liquid petroleum. Yet, he decides to fashion a makeshift torch to wade in, seemingly oblivious to the dangers.
Meanwhile, Kazim attempts to kill them by lighting the petroleum on fire with a match. In reality, the mere lighting of the torch, or a single fallen ember, would have been enough to ignite the petroleum and send the entire place up like the Fourth of July.
Kazim Plunges Out Of Sight
After Indy and Kazim battle on the speedboat in Venice, they narrowly avoid being chewed up by a large propeller and decide to call it a day. That gives Kazim time to reveal his identity as a protector of the Holy Grail’s secret, indicating that he’s not actually a threat. They agree to an exchange: Kazim’s life for the location of Indy’s father Henry.
Indy and Elsa drop Kazim off at the nearest pier, where they exchange their final pleasantries. As Kazim walks away into the background, he seems to fall into some unseen abyss. Judging by the sudden and swift rate of descent, it doesn’t appear like he’s walking down steps, but rather as if he’s falling from a great height. All that’s missing is the Wilhelm scream.
Anachronistic Nazis
The Third Reich features predominantly in The Last Crusade as they attempt to secure yet another fabled supernatural artifact. Unfortunately, history doesn’t seem to be on the side of this particular film, especially when it comes to the fine details surrounding the various military branches of the German army at that time.
For instance, the scene where Marcus Brody is thrown into a truck features the Afrika Korps symbol, which was formed in 1941. This film takes place in 1938, however, before the war officially broke out. It was the first of a few chronological goofs in The Last Crusade.
A Book Burning Too Late
The burning of books and suppression of free speech by censorious governments is a moral crime on so many levels, and it’s good to see The Last Crusade shed some light upon this appalling practice. Unfortunately, they were a bit too late. The scene portrayed in the film takes place in 1938, but the actual incidents in question took place in 1933.
It’s possible that the Third Reich discovered a few more caches of material they deemed threatening to their agenda, but it’s far more likely that the filmmakers just got this one wrong. Nevertheless, it’s a solemn and tragic scene in an otherwise fun film about Indiana and his pop going up against the thuggish Nazis.
Insulting The SS
The villainous Vogel serves as a typical brutish villain standing in direct opposition to the Joneses, and he’s played spectacularly by character actor Michael Byrne. Throughout the film, he’s the attack dog who pursues Indy and Henry before meeting his poetic end plunging off a cliff while still inside his tank.
Vogel bears the SS rank of Standartenführer, which is the equivalent rank to a Colonel in the German army. However, he’s repeatedly called ‘Herr Oberst’ in the film. To viewers, it makes no difference, but the character would have found it incredibly insulting.
The Upside Down Newspaper
One of the most obvious laugh-out-loud gaffes of the entire film is the scene where Indy and Henry board the zeppelin. They believe they’re out of the woods when Vogel and his men show up to search for them. Henry, wise as ever, decides to read his newspaper—upside down.
It’s possible that he was only trying to obscure his face, but anyone wishing to keep a low profile would surely have oriented the newspaper right side up. It isn’t known whether Steven Spielberg intentionally meant for Henry to keep the newspaper upside down for laughs, but it’s quite possible it simply got away from him during filming.
The Bottomless Grail
Apparently, the cup of a carpenter can hold an infinite amount of water, as evidenced by the final scene of The Last Crusade. Indy picks the right Grail from a treasure trove of fakes and rushes back to heal his dying father by making him drink from it while pouring the entire remainder on his bullet wound.
Yet, in the next shot, a recovering Henry holds the Grail close to his chest, which shows quite a bit of water left inside. The angle of Indy’s pouring in the previous shot would have emptied the entire Grail out, so this was an obvious technical goof that went unnoticed during filming. At least they found it, which is more than could be said for Monty Python’s crew.
