The top mistakes in The African Queen http://www.moviemistakes.com/film1584 en Sat, 04 Feb 2012 06:56:07 +0000 9766 When Charlie Allnut grabs a bottle of gin from the box, all the bottles in it are wrapped with paper for transport. But when Rose Sayer takes the bottles out of the box to empty them into the river, the paper is gone (from the movements of her hand/wrist, you can tell that she doesn't unwrap the paper from the bottles). 54286 When the boat is supposedly surrounded by a swarm of flies, they're really just relatively few flies trapped between two panes of glass in front of the camera lens. Evidence: whenever the camera moves, the "swarm" moves with it against the background, and you can even see some of the insects walking on the surface of the glass. 33565 In the scene where the German East African troops are shooting at Bogart and Hepburn, their rifles are Gewehr 88 "Commission Rifles'" with five-shot magazines. In actuality, the German East African troops, under the command of Colonel Paul Von Letow-Vorbeck, were equipped with the absolute dregs of the Kaiser's arsenal: Gewehr 71 single-shot rifles, and Gewehr 71/84 8-round tube magazine rifles whose magazines usually got fouled and had to be used as single-shot rifles anyway. 69180 In the scene where there is a terrific storm while Bogart and Hepburn are asleep, Bogart gets extremely wet before being invited into the shelter by Hepburn. Upon entering the shelter and lying down to sleep, Bogart's blanket is perfectly dry. 78476 The scene where the German officer is blinded by the sun and thus can't shoot at Humphrey Bogart could never have happened. The Imperial German East African Army had no rifles capable of accepting a telescopic sight. In fact, throughout the war, its commander, Colonel Paul Von Letow-Vorbeck, had his marksmen trained to use open sights, not scopes. The rifle used in the scene was a British Lee-Enfield No. 1 Mk. 1 modified to accept a telescopic sight, which would have been scarce in Africa, even in the British Army. But it couldn't have been captured, as unit armorers in the British Army began scoping Lee-Enfields in mid 1915.