Movie Pipe Bloopers

You could be right

I noticed the same thing. It was a Peterson.I watch for all kinda blooms on films. Makes some of em worth watching !

Also you can tell by the shape and density of the smoke that the tobacco being smoked is totally just a mid 1960's OTC generic blend!
:nana:

I don't have eneough room here !one: war films all Tiger tanks are Russian T34 modified. There's a marked difference in the drive train. I still got a bucket full. Ha ha

Jabo, they used a real Tiger in the movie Fury. So there's that.

England. It's in a museum. It still took quite a bit of convincing to allow the film to use it.

There was a mini-series a couple of years ago, historical fiction, about the gold rush in Alaska, that had these guys living off the wilderness, and smoking Missouri Meerschaums, with the chewy black stems. They were obviously straight out of the package. They didn't try to make the pipes look homemade at all.

Could that pipe that Lee Van Cleef is smoking in The Good The Bad & The Ugly be a WDC Wellington? The WDC company was established in 1862.

I think the spaghetti Western has much latitude for poetic license. It's not a historical paper. But it is fun to spot the errors. A late friend of mine was an vastly experienced bird watcher (really much of it is done by ear, and he could identify birds of Europe, Asia, etc. etc.). He couldn't watch a movie with bird calls of any kind on the sound track without noticing the error in habitat, season, ecology, etc. I wouldn't even have thought about any of this. Same thing with Civil War buffs. You can't make them happy. Any detail is wrong. A Civil War buff friend of mine pointed out that the Southern accents in "Gettysburg," the dramatization with Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee, had the Southern accents much exaggerated since the heavy Southern accent didn't emerge until the South became poorer and more isolated after the Civil War.

The boots the actors wore were lefts and rights. Hardly the style of the 1860s. Holsters and other leather gear were hardly period either. Belts full of brass and lead. I think Sergio Leone was less interested in historical accuracy than making a movie which would generate profits.
Was Robert Young's pipe ever lit? A Few Dollars More? Precolored meer? The calabash in Rathbone's portrayal of Holmes? I think not! Then again, the pipes are just props. De Nero and a cob was a great stroke.

Could that pipe that Lee Van Cleef is smoking in The Good The Bad & The Ugly be a WDC Wellington? The WDC company was established in 1862.

Click to expand...

I'm not an expert, but the WDC Wellingtons I've seen, although similar to Petersons, seem to have more of a flair in their stems, like the one in the above photo of Van Cleef. Here's a photo I found from Reborn Pipes.

Just noticed this about lee Van Cleef ...a bit of trivia ..
Van Cleef had a son that was a professor at the University of Ga. while my youngest

daughter was enrolled .

she told me that someone once asked the son what he tough about when his father was

always cast as a villan

The son replied he had never saw one of those for him he was always my idol and hero in ever role!

hooboy

Any movie prop man or woman worth their salt should by now know about Old Dominion corn cob pipes from Virginia. These have reed stems and would be a reasonable approximation for cob pipes from the U.S. 1800's. To momentarily empathize with movie companies, productions are most often mayhem involving dozens to hundreds of people, and after months of preparation, a lot of the decisions are made in a mad confused rush in forty-five minutes. Usually there are numerous big egos badgering everyone else, and lots of sensitive artistic people as well, so the fact that any scene comes across as convincing is a small miracle. The reason that some small productions done by just a few people are so good is that they still have focus and control and aren't addled into irrationality. Add to this the fact that actors who really know how to smoke a pipe, or anything about tobacco pipes, are almost nonexistent.
Re. the Van Cleef son's comment, I can see the validity. We all need parents right on through life, and we need the parents we want, so we forgive and deny as necessary. This should reassure parents, especially those going through teenage with their kids who, for a time, can see nothing good about their parents and are embarrassed to be seen with or near them. Still, it would have been good if Lee's son could have seen the mastery in his dad's work of the villain roles. Often, villains make the drama, and he certainly added greatly to Clint's career. I remember a scene where Van Cleef is eating, and it emotes rage in the process. Amazing.

Thanks for the comment!

If all children were as astute , what a wonderful world!!

hooboy

I remember an episode of M*A*S*H* where Radar was reading comic books published in the mid-1960s. That was a bad error.