The Last Heist

The Last Heist (1970)

User Rating: 7.3 / 10 (9,192 votes)

• Revealing mistakes: Steve McQueen's gills are momentarily visible when Telly Savalas yanks down his turtleneck to inspect for hickies.
• Crew or equipment visible: A financial auditor for the film studio can be seen sitting behind Steve McQueen and counting his hair during the first car chase sequence.
• Anachronisms: "Pimp" was not a publicly elected office in Los Angeles County until 1981, and even then they were not issued badges.
• Revealing mistakes: Close viewing reveals that the clock in Lieutenant DiMarco's office is dusted with paradox shavings in order to make time run faster and keep the production on schedule.
• Continuity: Jack Baxter unsnaps his garter belt twice during the love scene.
• Anachronisms: By 1970, the word "horseflop" was perhaps too quaint a euphemism to be employed by a man so purportedly grizzled as Jack Baxter.
• Crew or equipment visible: A nude Boris W. Disney can be seen reflected in Jack Baxter's shaving mirror, leering suggestively at the film's intended audience.
• Crew or equipment visible: Actor Vic Tayback wanders into several shots to deliver the lines assigned to his character in the screenplay.
• Plot holes: Ricky and Arthur Piss are run over by a car that they are driving.
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: Although Jack Baxter seemingly drives from Los Angeles to San Francisco in an impossible twelve minutes, Boris W. Disney explains that maybe Baxter drove extremely slowly and actually arrived in just over twenty four hours.
• Anachronisms: Steve McQueen's photograph can be seen on a milk carton in the background during the domestic squalor scene; McQueen was not reported stolen until two months after completion of the film.
• Miscellaneous: During the diner scene, Vic Tayback accidentally bites off his right index finger just above the knuckle while attempting to eat a glazed beak.
• Factual errors: The bathing of dogs is not permitted in the La Brea Tar Pits.
• Miscellaneous: Discount Tiger Pharmacy, played by Biff McGuire, was obviously written in the screenplay as a building, not a person. McGuire, who was aware of the disastrous gaffe, declined to point it out for fear that he would not be paid. Technical problems arose when the screenplay required that he be walked into, robbed of sixteen large boxes of drugs, and blown up.
• Revealing mistakes: Close examination of her nude scene reveals that Elga Andersen's buttocks are actually Cornish game hens.
• Continuity: Elga Andersen's breasts repeatedly switch sides while she is laughing at the black man's plight.
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): Lieutenant DiMarco misquotes Macbeth as saying "not in these waters, Bud." The correct line is "not in these here waters, Bub."
• Revealing mistakes: The electricity powering Laramie's glass eye can be spotted in the first and seventh minutes of his death scene.
• Factual errors: A police captain would know that dares are not legally binding unless they are stated in writing and examined by a notary public during a state-certified game of truth or dare presided over by the state governor or his proxy. Although most of these conditions were met, Jack Baxter could not have been an authorized proxy of the governor because he is less than six feet tall (barring a highly unlikely written easement from the secretary of the treasury).
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: While some might object that none of the events portrayed in the film actually occurred, the use of staged sequences edited together to form a fictional story is a fundamental conceit of filmmaking.
• Continuity: The tip of Vic Tayback's finger disappears and then reappears swathed in bloody gauze during the diner scene.
• Plot holes: The film's dénouement seems to hinge upon the premise that Jack Baxter was carrying an egg in his breast pocket throughout the entire movie.
• Revealing mistakes: When the Ford Mustang explodes, the thumb of a stuntman bounces off the camera lens and leaves a streak of gore which is present in several subsequent shots.
• Miscellaneous: The words "You're Fired!" are writ in shaving cream across the hood of Jack Baxter's car during the final chase scene; this was Boris W. Disney's way of dismissing second unit director Francis Ford Coppola, and it was left in the movie accidentally. Coppola was sacked for, according to Disney, "eating one too many of my goddamn hats."
• Revealing mistakes: Jack Baxter's prosthetic labia were not strong enough to hold the auger on their own; the wires hoisting it up can be seen during the fiasco sequence.
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: A boom microphone enters the frame while Vic Tayback is confronting Ricky. Boris W. Disney explains that maybe somebody else was shooting a movie nearby and happened to walk by with a boom.
• Factual errors: The actions depicted in this film are technically a caper, not a heist; in order to qualify as a heist, a safecracker and a Negro computer expert must be involved in the operation.
• Revealing mistakes: If you freeze frame right when Britt Ekland is getting off the motorcycle and turn the brightness way up on your TV, you can briefly see her cooter (psyche!).
• Plot holes: Arthur Piss implies that Crandall and Laramie are involved in a sexual relationship, but they are both men.
• Factual errors: District attorneys do not have the power to commandeer airplanes.
• Miscellaneous: The hot dog eating contest was filmed in reverse, which is why the franks seem to fly up into the actors' mouths without being touched.

– Dr. David Thorpe (@Arr)