11 Movie Mistakes Only Smug Nerds Would Ever Notice
1. Andy Dusfresne Is A Time Traveller
Shawshank Redemption is often called the greatest film of all time, and its status among the very elite is not to be questioned, even though the response on its initial release was surprisingly muted. One possible reason for the enduring popularity of the film could be that the lead character, Tim Robbins' hugely relatable, tragic Andy Dufresne is clearly able to time travel. Either that, or the film is littered with distracting anachronisms that make its brilliance all the more impressive.
The list of errors is massive, but we're focusing on the most nerdy of all of them, and probably the most difficult to spot. In the beautiful opera scene in which Andy locks the screw in the toilet and plays music to his fellow inmates, the recording chosen of "Le nozze di Figaro" was created in 1968 by Karl Böhm, a full 14 years after the time period portrayed in the film. And then there's the fact that both of Andy's most memorable posters, of Rita Hayworth and Raquel Welch, defy the timeline as well. The poster from One Million Years B.C. featuring Welch may have been from the right year (1966 - when Andy escaped) but the film wasn't released until December, and the poster only became popular after the film's release.
Even more impressively, the Rita Hayworth poster that Red gets for Andy in 1949 is taken from a set of celebrity posters that went on sale sometime in the 1960s. And for any financial nerds out there, you may have noticed (though probably not) that Andy tells Hadley that the IRS allow a one time tax free gift to a spouse, to solve his inheritance issue, despite the fact that the IRS wasn't called the IRS until the 1950s, and at the time of the scene (1949) it was known as the Bureau of Internal Revenue, which a banker would presumably know.