Best history movie factual errors of all time

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Victoria and Abdul picture

Factual error: Performing for Queen Victoria is the famous opera composer Giacomo Puccini. This happens during her sojourn in Florence in 1888. Puccini was born in 1858, so he was barely thirty years of age, but the actor portraying him, Simon Callow, is in his late 60s (and it shows). Moreover, he is presenting his latest creation "Manon Lescaut"; in 1888 he hadn't even started working on it.

Sammo

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Land of Mine picture

Factual error: The bunkers which are visible in the movie have not been prepped to look how they should in the years after the war. They would have been plastered and painted, not looking old and rusty as they appear in the movie.

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Blitz picture

Factual error: Someone shouts "jobsworth" at a London Underground official. This term is first recorded in 1970. The film is set in 1940.

Necrothesp

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Secretariat picture

Factual error: When Secretariat crosses the finish line, that finish line pole is not from Belmont, that finish line pole is from Keeneland.

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Judgment at Nuremberg picture

Factual error: The Mercedes-Benz car in which Judge Haywood is driven to his house shows a license plate with black letters on white background and country plate "D." This was not correct at that time: it should have been white letters on a black background, no country plate. (00:04:09)

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Nuremberg picture

Factual error: One of the cars featured at the end of the film is an Alvis TA21, which only entered production in 1950, several years after the Nuremberg Trials.

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Silence picture

Factual error: When the characters are drowning on stakes in the ocean there is a modern yacht in the background.

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From the Earth to the Moon picture

Factual error: When the command module, with the engine shut down, is in earth or lunar orbit or in trans lunar coast (external shot), you hear a rumbling sound. It's in a non powered coast, so there shouldn't be any engine noise.

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The Oklahoma Kid picture

Factual error: When Cagney surprises Ward Bond in a saloon, they run out the back and across a rail freight yard. They jump onto boxcars of a slow moving train. Bond jumps up between two older wooden-bodied boxcars, A and B. Cagney, in pursuit, jumps up between cars B and C. In the wide shots, car C is seen to be a steel-bodied boxcar built at the earliest in the late 1930's. Events in the movie show the time-line to be set in September, 1893.

tcmfan43

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Confirmation picture

Factual error: When Anita Hill is in her hotel room waiting to testify she is watching the Texas v. OU football game. In the movie the date for that scene is Friday, October 11, 1991. The Texas v. OU football game was played on Saturday, October 12, 1991.

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Anthropoid picture

Factual error: The jacket blurb and plot synopsis for "Anthropoid" are historically and factually incorrect in stating that Heydrich was "third in command" of Nazi Germany. He was not; there was a chain of Nazi hierarchy above him and any historian of Nazi Germany will verify that. Unfortunately, Rotten Tomatoes perpetuates this inaccuracy by using the same jacket blurb in its own plot summary of the movie.

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