The Old Man and the Sea (1958)

Continuity mistake: After the old man has brought his fish in - really only the skeleton, after the sharks and other fish have devoured the fish - he goes straight to bed. The next morning, the boy goes to the bar and asks for coffee, with milk and sugar. But when the boy pours the coffee into a small tin cup, it is black, not a drop of milk to be seen.

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Continuity mistake: When the old man goes out fishing, after 84 days with no luck, one of his four lines catches a fish, but the fish drags the line out of the black ring, which it was tied to, but when the old man goes to the rod, the line is still there - which it shouldn't be.

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Trivia: After Ernest Hemingway guided two extremely expensive (and failed) offshore excursions for original marlin-fishing footage, Warner Brothers settled for existing footage of a world-record marlin caught off the coast of Peru by Alfred C. Glassell, Jr. His taut, heavy-duty fishing line can be seen bouncing wildly, high in the air, in the scene where the marlin finally breaches (even though the Old Man's hand-line is pretty much stationary and angled low to the ocean surface).

Charles Austin Miller

Trivia: For close-ups of the giant marlin swimming near the skiff, Warner Brothers committed to building a giant, realistic, mechanical marlin with moving fins and tail, which was going to be deployed in actual open-ocean shots. Unfortunately, the first time it was lowered into Gulf Stream waters off the coast of Cuba, the elaborate mechanical marlin immediately sank and was never seen again. Thereafter, they used the much-less-realistic static marlin model that bobbed on the surface like a cork in a sound stage water tank (arguably the weakest scenes in the film).

Trivia: Spencer Tracy's hair was not naturally white when they first started filming "The Old Man and the Sea"; so, his hair was cosmetically bleached white for the part of Santiago. However, after a grueling two years in production and his lapse back into alcoholism, Tracy's hair naturally turned white by the time they finished the film.

Charles Austin Miller