The Shawshank Redemption sits at the top of IMDB’s list of the greatest films of all time. To have over 2 million reviews and still be sitting on a 9.3/10 is a seriously impressive feat. Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins shine as Red and Andy Dufresne, while the adaptation of Stephen King’s (yes, Stephen King wrote this as well) short story is masterful.
Despite its position sitting firmly at the top of cinema, it was still prone to a few errors in continuity. We’ve listed 10 times that The Shawshank Redemption didn’t quite add up.
Brooks’ Cart
Brooks is one of the kindest, most tragic characters in Shawshank Redemption. He sets up a nice little library, but can’t adapt to life outside of prison, leaving us with the incredibly sad memory: ‘Brooks Was Here.’ He is front and center in one of the funnier continuity errors in the film, though. When he gives Andy one of his hammers, he moves past Andy’s cell and continues to wander down the aisle. However, the aisle actually ends just outside of Andy’s cell, so there shouldn’t have been anywhere for him to go.
A Change Of Finger
Right at the end of the film, Red is just as confused about Andy’s escape as anyone else, but the guards seem to think he has something to do with it. They approach Red in order to ask him about it, with Norton pointing towards him from afar with his left hand. As soon as the camera angle changes to show the guards from a different perspective, it is his right hand that is being used.
The Exploding Pipe
A Hollywood blockbuster has to have its fair share of exciting, overly dramatic moments, right? Well, Shawshank isn’t really a film made for dramatic chase scenes or bloody shoot-outs, so they have to get their kicks elsewhere. In this case, from a sewage pipe.
When Andy smashed open the pipe with a rock, a lot of sewage spurts out of the hole like the pipe is completely full and pressurized, but when he actually gets inside, there is only a little stream of sewage in there. It doesn’t really make sense that the events of the previous scene even happened.
The Extra Quick Change
During Andy and Red’s first meeting, we see an extra in the background as they each deliver their lines. For some reason, this extra is wearing a completely different shirt based on which character we are watching speak.
This seems to suggest that their lines were each shot on different days, because why else would the extra have changed shirt between shots? And why did they let him come to set in different clothes when they knew he’d be in the background of the same shot?
The Warden’s Flawed Suicide
The warden was a figure of fear and anger in the prison, running a regime full of abuse, corruption, and general unpleasantness. Right at the end of the film, when he realizes he has truly messed up by letting Andy Dufresne escape his ‘secure’ prison, he commits suicide by shooting himself in the chin with a pistol.
Frank Darabont himself has admitted that the continuity error in the scene annoyed him so much that he fixed it in the 2004 remaster. The bullet hole in his chin used to be in a very clearly different place than where he appeared to shoot himself.
Colour Changing Bible
There are a few times in films where certain errors in continuity just seem like they don’t need to happen. This one, for example, just seems like it could be avoided so easily if the crew didn’t alternate between a variety of different versions of the same prop. When Andy’s cell is being searched, he is reading a clean, blue bible. When the warden asks him about his favorite bible verses, the bible is dirty, old, and very clearly black. To avoid this, all they needed to do was have just the one bible to be used as the only prop.
The Classic Continuity Error
If you were to take a look at the continuity errors in just about any film ever, there will always be one that messes up something to do with a security camera or a memory of something that has already been shown in the film.
In this case, it happens when Red is telling the story of Andy switching the shoes and books, the scene of Andy doing it is replayed. Except, it isn’t the same version of the scene, so instead of saying “three deposits sir”, he says “three deposits tonight”. Why didn’t they just replay the actual scene?
Changing Windows
When Red is finally released from prison after many years of desperately trying to have his good behavior and rehabilitation recognized, he happily sits on the bus with his arm dangling out of the window. In fact, every window on the bus is open, so those being released could engage in as much arm-dangling as they please. When the scene changes and the bus is shown again, the windows are all closed again. Obviously, Red is no longer dangling his arm out either.
Andy Doesn’t Age
The very fact that Shawshank Redemption is set over a period of around twenty years should suggest that the characters involved would age by that much too. However, Andy looks basically exactly the same from the moment he is on trial, all the way to when he is on the beach twenty years later. If you were to look up pictures of Tim Robbins himself in 2014 (twenty years after the film was released) you’d see that he looked very, very different. In theory, this is what Andy should have looked like when he escaped.
Various Anachronisms
Considering the film is set (well, starts) all the way back in 1947 but was released in 1994, there were a lot of era-related issues Frank Darabont should have accounted for. This creates an error in continuity against the real-life backdrop the film supposedly exists within.
The brand of cigarettes most often used in the film didn’t exist for over fifty years. The Hank Williams record was being listened to seven years early. There are various issues with the way Andy handled taxes. The picture of Albert Einstein laughing was present four years early. You get the idea.
