Revealing mistake: When Philippe the Mouse is caught by the Bishop's guards after he has escaped from prison, Navarre shoots an arrow into one of the guard's arms to stop him cutting Philippe's throat. If you look at the spot on the guard's upper arm where the arrow will hit just as Philippe says 'May God have mercy on my soul', you will see that there is already a hole there - even before the arrow hits him.
Ladyhawke (1985)
1 revealing mistake - chronological order
Directed by: Richard Donner
Starring: Michelle Pfeiffer, Matthew Broderick, Alfred Molina, Rutger Hauer, Leo McKern
Continuity mistake: After Philippe the Mouse escapes from the prison and has swam out the underwater grate hole, another scene shows soldiers riding through the peasants leaving the castle to search for him. In the background, two soldiers can be seen sitting by the moat, eating. One stands and grabs suddenly around his belt, obviously looking around for something. A while after this in a separate scene, Philippe the Mouse is shown surfacing in the moat behind these two soldiers and grabbing the knife from beside one of them and slicing away a cord on the soldiers belt and stealing his coin purse, then swimming away quietly and saying the line about 'I know I promised not to steal Lord, but I know, that you know, what a weak-willed person I am...' Obviously the scene with the soldier standing suddenly and discovering his missing coin purse should have come after the actual 'stealing of the purse' scene.
Etienne Navarre: Do you know that hawks and wolves mate for life? The Bishop didn't even leave us that... not even that.
Trivia: In the days before ubiquitous digital technology, the majority of visual effects in film were "practical" effects using stuntmen and props on wires, springboards, flash-pots, et cetera. In "Ladyhawke" (which was decidedly on the low-end of visual effects budgets), one of the most dangerous practical effects is seen when Matthew Broderick and Rutger Hauer have a heated discussion in the woods and seem about to part company. As Broderick turns to leave, Hauer's 53" longsword sizzles past the boy's left shoulder and embeds in a tree trunk, to Broderick's horror. In fact, the steel sword was real and hurtled to its target on a guide-wire, barely 8 inches from Broderick's back. If you slow-advance the scene, you can see the sword actually changing trajectory in-flight, it was so unstable. The sword came up in a Hollywood memorabilia auction in 2002 but was not sold. http://www.icollector.com/Rutger-Hauer-prop-special-effects-sword-from-Ladyhawke_i169815.
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