Question: Was P.L. Travers left-handed, as Emma Thompson portrays her when she is shown writing?
Answer: I do not know the actual answer to your question. However, I would like to point out as a lefty myself that we often have to use our right hand for certain activities just due to the fact that left handed options are not readily available. Scissors and shears are a great example of this. Very often you cannot just switch them to your left hand and have them work. They actually have to be put together to be left handed to work properly. Also, many left handed writers are also ambidextrous. For example I golf right handed but bat left handed so the two swings don't negatively affect each other.
Question: How accurate is the portrayal of the Untouchables, when it comes to names and numbers? Were there actually only four of them? Do Garcia, Connery and Smith play actual people or fictive ones?
Answer: It's about 50% truth and 50% fiction. Ness, Al Capone, and Frank Nitty are real, of course, but the characters played by Connery, Garcia, and Smith are fictional. Ness started out with 50 candidates for his 'Untouchables' force. This was whittled down to 15 finalists and from that he selected 9 agents (none of which has the same name as the characters played by Connery, Garcia, and Smith). It's true that Capone was convicted for tax evasion. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison, but received an early release because he was in the last stages of syphilis. He died shortly after being released from prison.
Capone lived for 8 years upon his release from prison. The 8 years being slightly longer than the actual prison time he served, which was just over 7 years. He died, having the mental capabilities of a 12-year-old.
Question: In the 'War Room' scene, there appeared to be a sheet of plastic or acetate covering the wall with the map of the enemy's movements. Was that premature for plastic to be available in that size for that time frame?
Question: I first saw the movie in a cinema when it was first released. I'm quite sure I saw a scene which was later edited out, perhaps to accommodate the ratio of television screens. Before the attack various soldiers stop to listen to a strange sound echoing over the hills - "like a train" someone says. After we hear the sound twice my memory is that the movie cut to a panoramic view of thousands of Zulu warriors running across the veld, banging their shields with their spears, on their way to Rorke's Drift. This is what was causing the "train" sound, a phenomenon that is not explained subsequently anywhere in the edited version of the film. The dramatic effect of the shot, panning across what looks like thousands of armed Zulus, was riveting and served to emphasise the impossible odds faced by the British. Am I the only one who recalls this scene?
Answer: Absolutely correct. This exact scene is in my DVD of Zulu. They may have changes when the TV version aired, but this definitely in the original.
Question: When the men finally get their shoes, they are just tossed a pair from the wagon and they automatically fit. Were military shoes back then one size fits all? How could they have shoes that automatically fit them?
Answer: To add to the answer, it's shown in the film in this scene as a soldier approaches a pile of shoes and places a pair on the pile and grabs another.
Chosen answer: The shoes would have been a mix of the most common sizes, and the men would have gone through them to find the right size...swapping when necessary. Keep in mind many of them were barefoot, so even shoes of the wrong size would have been a blessing.
Question: What happened to the one Native American that Governor Ratcliffe shot? I know he went back to the village for treatment but what happened to him afterwards? Did he die?
Answer: This is a question the movie chose not to answer. It could be assumed he died as the Powhatans did not have the knowledge to treat gunshot wounds. However, there were cases even as far back as this time of individuals being able to survive gunshot wounds as long as the bleeding could be stopped and infection didn't spread. As the Powhatans did know herbs in the land to treat infections and did know how to mend bleeding; it is also possible he lived though he would have walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
Question: Can anyone tell me if Santa Anna really ran away from Houston's forces as it shows in the movie? And was that battle really over in 18 minutes? (Not being an American or a Texan for that matter, I have very little knowledge about what happened at the Alamo, I'm just curious).
Answer: Yes, the battle of San Jacinto really did last 18 minutes. Houston's army surprised the Mexican army while they were taking an afternoon nap.
Answer: The defenders of the Alamo held off Santa Anna's troops for 13 days before a final assault on 6 March 1836, where the complex was stormed just before dawn. The battle ended by sunrise. Santa Anna was captured at the Battle of San Jacinto in April of the same year, and Texas won its independence from Mexico. Also check www.thealamo.org for detailed information and links.
Answer: In a way. Santa Anna tried to pass himself off as a common soldier, but when he was captured, his men spilled the beans by calling him by his title.
Question: Why did Brooks want to make his players hate him?
Answer: Since they all came from different, sometimes rival, universities, and thus had no commonality, he wanted to give them someone to dislike together, instead of fighting with one another. If they could all bond over what a bastard Brooks was, they'd come together faster as a team and have a chance of winning.
Question: During Rex Harrison's entire performance as Julius Caesar his arms and legs are covered by garments underneath his military garb and robes, even while in Egypt. The other Romans as would be expected have bare legs and arms. Was Harrison suffering from some skin condition or was he too shy or embarrassed of his limbs to show them in the film?
Answer: The people of higher rank would usually have more or better armor so in his case that would probably be extra armor for his legs and arms.
Question: I don't know anything about identical twins, so this is why I'm asking this question: how likely is it that Louis and Phillipe would have the exact same speech pattern?
Answer: There would be both genetic similarities and individual differences, and their vocabularies would have developed differently by education and experience. However, Phillipe was heavily tutored before the switch took place, and as "king" he would be able to distance himself (physically, mentally, and emotionally) as much as needed from members of his court until he perfected his role, along with the continued help from those in on the deception. Also, the audience and readers of the novel are expected to employ a certain "suspension of disbelief" in order to allow the story to be told.
Question: I don't quite get how the Hoffa killing plays out. His son is there in the car, Frank and Jimmy go into the house, Frank shoots him, apparently not heard, then leaves the house...doesn't Chuckie Hoffa have questions? Like where his dad is for a start, let alone the gunshots he must have heard?
Chosen answer: First off his name was Chuckie O'Brian. Jimmy Hoffa wasn't his biological father, he was more in the nature of a foster father. Second, he probably knew what happened. What was Chuckie going to do? It was a sanctioned hit. And if he went to the police he would have ended up the same as Jimmy Hoffa. They put him in the middle of it to keep him quiet. If he goes after the people who did it, he's as good as dead. If he talks he could end up in jail with them, and the mafia will probably kill him anyway.
Question: In the John Wayne film, Frankie Avalon is riding into Sam Houston's camp and is stopped by two sentries. The one questioning him appears to bear a striking resemblance to Robert Mitchum. Is this him?
Answer: No, that's not him. Robert Mitchum has no part in this movie.
Question: What exactly happened to Iggy? Are we ever supposed to know exactly how he died?
Answer: The movie insinuates that he was killed horribly but doesn't provide many details. Books about Iwo Jima have quotes from witnesses about what happened to him and they all say that he was very brutally tortured, including having his eyes cut out and his genitals removed and stuffed in his mouth. The book "Flags of Our Fathers" contains the following quote, "A few days later someone yelled that they'd found him. They called me over because I was a corpsman. The Japanese had pulled him underground and tortured him. His fingernails... his tongue... It was terrible. I've tried hard to forget all this.
Question: I don't know anyone who stammers so I'm asking here: That trick Lionel pulled when he had Bertie reading with the earphones on and the music blasting - does it really work? Bertie obviously thinks he's still stammering, but don't stammerers sense if they're doing it even if they can't hear themselves speaking? And if it does work, why the drama with the radio broadcasts? Bertie could have put the earphones on and simply read the broadcast like he did "Hamlet".
Answer: The technique is called "masking" and all though it can sometimes help those who stutter it is not 100% reliable. It will make some stutter less, others will not notice any difference. It would probably be very inconvenient to Bertie not to hear himself at all during an important speech, not to mention that those around him might find the whole thing strange. You can read more about research on this technique and other similar ones here: http://ajslp.asha.org/cgi/content/abstract/16/1/77.
Question: Why does the play start with The Van Daans already at the Annex when it's clear that they arrive a week later in the diary?
Answer: Movies do not always exactly follow the books they are adapted from. Oftentimes scenes and/or characters are changed, deleted, or streamlined, often because there is a limited amount of time in a movie to tell the story. In this case, it just simplified the plot by having the Van Daans already at the Annex, eliminating the need for two separate arrivals and instead focusing on the Frank family's reactions to their situation.
Question: How were the brothers able to steal the second car, after their hostage escaped? Or was that their car? They just jumped in and drove away with no apparent time or effort spent.
Answer: The smaller car belonged to them. They go and pick it up again after Dun Meng escapes the Mercedes at the gas station.
Thank you! With hindsight, maybe that's obvious, but I didn't catch it when I watched the movie.
Question: During "Cool, Considerate Men," what does John Hancock mean by "British half-crown" when he says, ". . . traitors to what? The British crown, or the British half-crown"?
Chosen answer: By "the British Crown" he meant the king. By "the British half Crown" he was just referring to the money in use by the British at the time.
Exactly contrasting loyalty to the country with loyalty to profit.
Question: Why attempt Russian accents in a film that is purely Russian? The star, Harrison Ford, doesn't even pretend to be Russian. Why should anyone else?
Answer: Harrison Ford does attempt a Russian accent in this film. It's a very slight, very bad attempt but he's definitely trying. Audiences come to expect accents in films such as these for a heightened sense of immersion. Hearing American accents from supposedly Russian characters can sometimes be jarring to an audience, even if the characters are speaking English. This of course isn't always the case and plenty of films have actors speaking in their natural accents while they are playing foreign characters. The director of this film chose to have his actors speak with Russian accents, with extremely poor results pretty much all around.
Question: At the end of the movie it shows what happens to everyone. It shows Mary and William Stafford walking in the meadow and 3 children. There's a boy, presumably the boy Mary had with Henry and Anne's daughter Elizabeth. Does anybody know who the other girl is? She looks older than Elizabeth so I assume she's not Mary and Stafford's daughter.
Chosen answer: It is unknown who the older girl is, but probably the child of a close relative. In the movie (which significantly differs from the novel and from history), Mary is shown to only have given birth to one child (King Henry's son) before her marriage to William Stafford. Therefore, the girl could not be Mary's child by her first marriage.
Question: In the movie Detroit all the police cars had blue lights. Wasn't 1967 a bit early for blue lights? I'm thinking seventies.
Answer: Color photos from the incident as well as car restorer enthusiasts have shown that they already had blue lights. The Michigan State Police however used red lights.
Chosen answer: It seems P. L. Travers was, in fact, right-handed. With just a bit of research, I found this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeiEumLxTcM. At time reference 4:05, archive video shows Ms. Travers in her garden, holding a basket hooked on her left arm, and making clippings with a scissors in her right hand. Feeling convinced, I stopped, though I suspect further research (it's a six part biography) would yield other examples of P. L. Travers engaged in right-handed activities.
Michael Albert
Only problem with the assumption that travers was right-handed because she trimmed plants with her right hand is that there were no (to my knowledge) scissors for lefties. I was born in 1955 and I am a lefty who cuts right-handed, wear my watch on my left wrist, and made other adaptations due to the fact that left-handers were ignored, and travers was born over 50 years earlier.