Character mistake: At the confederate prison camp after they are captured a soldier comes up to the sergeant (Van Cleef) and informs him that the "Captain" wants to see him right away. In the next shot with Van Cleef where he is talking to the commanding officer you will see that he is not a captain but a major.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
1 character mistake
Directed by: Sergio Leone
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef
Continuity mistake: When Blondie abandons Tuco in the desert, watch the rope around Tuco's neck. It changes between shots, sometimes over his left shoulder, and sometimes hanging down in front of him. It is not due to the camera angle.
Tuco: I'll kill you.
Man With No Name: If you do that... You'll always be poor... Just like the greasy rat you are.
Question: At the end of the film Blondie, sitting on the horse, turns around, aims his rifle, fires, and severs the rope with a single shot. Lets face it, that rope would be a very small target, and difficult to hit with precision, even from ten or twenty feet, and Blondie is now so far from Tuco that he would no longer even be able to see the rope. Could anyone hit such a small target from such a distance with such incredible accuracy?
Answer: Probably not, but remember...this is a movie, a western at that and they typically have over the top action to excite audiences. Kinda like how it's impossible to shoot someone's hat off without harming them. It's all for show.
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Answer: There's a show called "Hollywood Weapons: Fact or Fiction" which dealt with this exact question (s01e03). Blondie is roughly 200 yds away. In the show the host didn't hit the rope, but only missed by an inch on his first attempt. I definitely think an expert Sharps Rifle shooter could make the shot. The issue however, is the bullet would most likely not actually slice the rope apart as seen in the film (they fired the Sharps at point blank and the rope remained partially intact still). They also tested shooting a hat off someone and (as expected) the bullet just goes right through the hat without lifting the hat at all.
Bishop73
That was another thing that puzzled me. On several occasions in this film, Tuco is suspended from a rope, and Blondie cuts the rope by firing a bullet at it, (I think Clint Eastwood repeated the trick in "The Outlaw Josey Wales"). But if you fired a bullet at a rope holding a (rather large) person like Tuco (or a similarly heavy weight), even at close range, would it really sever the rope? I will have to look out for "Hollywood Weapons Fact Or Fiction." I hope they only used a dummy or a model to re-create the shooting feats. I don't think I would have liked to have been hanging on a rope while somebody fired bullets at me to see if this would sever the rope, or to stand there while they fired bullets into my hat to see if they could lift it off my head.
Rob Halliday