The Fugitive

Factual error: During the car chase that leads to the tunnel, there are several freeway signs pointing to Murphy, North Carolina, and the film is set in Chicago.

Factual error: In the scene on the El where the cop gets shot, you can hear the train engineer saying, "Balbo, next stop"; this is also said later on the police radios, when they say there is an officer down at the Balbo station. Two problems: 1) There is no Balbo station. 2) Even if there were, the station they start from is at Lake street (looks like the main transfer station at Clark and Lake), and the train pulls out going north. However, Balbo is south of Lake street.

Factual error: When Dr. Nichols leaves the damaged elevator, and Kimble later exits (the infamous arm in the door shot), neither would be possible as the elevator was emergency stopped by Nichols and can be seen positioned just below the floor. The elevator doors would not line up with the floor doors, and both sets would need to be manually opened.

Factual error: In the train crash scene there are many mistakes. 2 locos are pulling a hand full of cars, a small switcher loco would actually have been used. Oil journal bearings that haven't been used for decades. A flat car carrying logs, but there is no logging in the Chicagoland area. The second loco for some reason derails. In reality the train would have just pushed the bus a few hundred feet with no derailment. The shed explodes. The 200 ton loco just slides along the soft ground.

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Mistakes

Continuity mistake: Kimble dyes his hair very dark to escape detection and dyed hair fades over time. For the rest of the movie his hair noticeably goes from darker shades to lighter shades and back again showing that the scenes were shot non-sequentially on different days with a fair amount of time in between.

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Trivia

Trivia: Director Andrew Davis had Harrison Ford start the film with a beard, and then shave it off, rather than using a disguise for Richard Kimble throughout the film.

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Questions

Question: Towards the end, before the confrontation with Kimble and Nicholls, the guy who was tracing Kimble's phone records tells the Marshalls that Kimble telephoned Sykes on the night of his wife's murder. But obviously it wasn't Kimble calling Sykes, it was Sykes using Kimble's phone. But why would Sykes be calling himself?

jenn_s_h85

Chosen answer: He didn't. A key plot point is that Nichols borrowed Kimble's car on the night of the murder. The call to Sykes, which is expressly stated by the marshals as being on Kimble's car phone, was from Nichols, presumably arranging to meet so that he could give Sykes Kimble's keys to get into his house to lie in wait for him.

Tailkinker ★

Thank you for explaining it. I've seen it several times and never realised how it went down.

And Tommy Lee Jones tells Kimble that they knew Nichols called Skyes from his car, but how? Wouldn't the more logical answer have been that the US Marshals thought that Kimble called Sykes from his car to tell the killer his wife was home alone? There is no way the US Marshalls would have known that the Kimble let Nichols borrow his call - that's the mistake in the movie! It actually should have made the Marshalls suspicious of Kimble, not exonerate him.

The Marshals know Kimble let Nichols borrow his car because Kimble told the police when he was initially interviewed following the murder. He gave a detailed account of his actions and whereabouts that night and mentioned that Nichols had borrowed his car. It didn't seem suspicious to the police at the time because Richard claimed he fought with a one armed man he didn't recognize; a story the police did not believe because there was no evidence of this and Kimble's wife "identified" her attacker as Richard. Gerard puts everything together when he realises that Nichols lied about knowing Lentz.

BaconIsMyBFF

How did Sam figure out that Nichols borrowed the vehicle and made the call to Sykes and gave him keys, etc? I know in the laundry he reveals that he knew this but when/how did he figure it out?

Answer: This is more of a question really. What kind of defense attorney did this high dollar, Dr. Kimble hire who do not show their defendant pictures of the one-armed men the police question? How do his attorneys not ask him "OK, which of these one-armed men did you fight with in your house?"

The prosecution is not required to inform the defense of every person the police interview or question. They are only required to give the defense whatever evidence they have against the accused. Simply questioning someone in a perceived dead only counts as evidence against the accused if the prosecutor mentions it in court. If the prosecutor were to say "We interviewed a one-armed man named Sykes and he says he doesn't know you", then Kimble's defense would be required to be given access to Sykes. We can assume this never happened.

BaconIsMyBFF

The Chicago police DID question Sykes after the Kimble murder. Review the scene where Sykes returns to his apartment after Kimble has been there. Girard starts asking Sykes questions, at first Sykes says he doesn't know anything about Kimble but then "remembers" that he had been interviewed by the police right after the Kimble murder. However, Sykes says that he gave the police an alibi, with 15 people supposedly confirming that Sykes was on a business trip and not in Chicago. The movie then implies that Sykes had been a Chicago cop and lost his arm "in the line of duty." Remember that the Chicago police focused on Kimble pretty quickly. Their investigators may have interviewed Sykes, but they likely didn't even come close to considering him as a potential murderer. Even with Sykes likely matching Kimble's description of the one-armed man, the police likely saw Sykes as a former cop... A former cop who had an alibi confirmed by 15 people. As I understand it, prosecutors don't have to tell defense attorneys about everyone that the cops question. They only have to tell the defense about potential witnesses that might be called in connection to the criminal trial. In this scenario, Sykes wouldn't have been part of the criminal trial (Again, supposedly on a business trip confirmed by 15 people on the night of the murder) and thus Kimble and his lawyers would never have known about his existence.

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