Corrected entry: At the book signing in Berlin, the camera pans from right to left and the guard at the very end of the line of soldiers (to the left) has his left hand raised in military salute to Hitler. All the other soldiers have their right hands extended.
ctown28
8th Dec 2004
Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (1989)
Join the mailing list
Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.
Correction: The person in question could have an injured right arm that he simply can't lift.
lionhead
Exactly. "If physical disability prevented raising the right arm, it was acceptable to raise the left." Kershaw, Ian (2001). The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0192802064.
ctown28 ★
There's nothing about it in the script though. So between the two options, on the one hand (no pun intended!) that the creators were aware of that fact, and on the other hand, that it was a movie mistake that wasn't noticed, well... There's no possible reason why they'd put that in deliberately. Still, Jon decides, and the rules seem to be that behavioural oddities are not generally considered mistakes.
Spiny Norman
But not every single bit of background extra behaviour gets detailed in the script. The point is simply that based on what we see there's no way to decree something like this as a "mistake", because it has a perfectly reasonable in-universe explanation, and there's no point having an endless chain of bickering about it.
Jon Sandys ★
So just to summarise: the "perfectly reasonable explanation" is, then, that some random bystander has an extremely convincing prosthetic arm (which serves no purpose at all for he story); and NOT that one of the many "extras" simply made a mistake.
Spiny Norman