North by Northwest
North by Northwest mistake picture

Continuity mistake: When Thornhill watches the road from the crop field, the way he holds the crop and how the leaves bend, differ between the front and back shots. Also, his hands disappear and the leaves swap between dry and green.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: At the field, the first time Thornhill throws himself on the floor there's just a road with gravel. When he stands up there's suddenly hay everywhere.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: During the crop-duster scene, the sun appears to gyrate around wildly, particularly when Cary Grant runs towards the Magnum Oil truck, forcing it to stop. The sun at this point is low down at this point with the shadow going long to the right (evening). When Cary Grant stands up and the driver tells him to run (after the crop-duster crashes into the truck), the sun has backed up to almost overhead with a very short shadow to the right (mid-day). This scene was apparently shot on the Garces Highway west of Delano, California in the flat Central Valley, a short distance east of Corcoran Road. Garces Highway is almost exactly east-west. All through the crop-duster scene the shadows appear in unexpected orientations from take to take.

North by Northwest mistake picture Video

Revealing mistake: In the shooting scene in the Mount Rushmore cafe, a boy in the background puts his fingers in his ears, because he knows the gun is about to be shot.

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Roger Thornhill: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
Eve Kendall: What makes you think you have to conceal it?
Roger Thornhill: She might find the idea objectionable.
Eve Kendall: Then again, she might not.

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Trivia: In the scene when Cary Grant is going up the steps to the UN, Alfred Hitchcock shot it from a rug truck across the street. He wasn't allowed to shoot the front of the UN. If you look closely, you can see a security guard in the left corner.

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Question: Several times in the movie one character is able to ascertain in which hotel room another character is staying simply by asking the front desk for the room number. Was this realistic at the time the movie was made? Today, a hotel would never divulge a guest's room number to a stranger, since such information could potentially be used by burglars and/or predators to gain access to hotel rooms. Was security really that lax in the 1950s?

Answer: Not really. You could (and at some hotels are still able to) keep your room number private or you could not - i.e. you could ask the hotel staff to keep your number secret from strangers, or you could ask them to tell anyone who might ask. Not having seen this movie, I don't know how likely it would be in the situations you speak of that the hotel guest would choose the latter option- it might be a mistake.

Blibbetyblip

Answer: Yes, security was that lax in the 1950s and beyond. People could acquire all kinds of information about individuals from various types of businesses. Not all were so careless, but many were or they naively didn't see a concern. In the late 1980s, I was a student at a university where a non-university person obtained his ex-girlfriend's class schedule simply by requesting it in-person from the registrar's office. Using that information, he was able to locate and fatally shoot her on campus.

raywest

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