Goofs

When Zero sits on top the haystacks waiting for the car from the Hotel Excelsior Palace, his pencil mustache is missing. It returns when he enters the car.

When Agatha and Zero are talking, Agatha's straps lie loosely on her arms in one shot, then tight on her shoulders in the next shot.

When Zero and Monsieur Gustave chase Jopling at Gabelmeister's peak, they each wear a priest's cloak over them. After the sledge falls, the cloak is gone.

Mr. Moustafa and Young Writer sit to dine. Mr. Moustafa orders two ducks roasted with olives, rabbit and salad. Later, after the prison scene with Pinky, Gunther, Wolf & Ludwig, we return to the dining room where the narrator says: "At this point in the story the old man fell silent and pushed away his saddle of lamb."

When Serge X. is serving the guests at the reading of Madame D.'s will, he is standing still in one shot, serving ice in the next, then again standing still again.

When Jopling is at the gas station, the calendar on the wall says "October 1932", but shows October 5, 12, 19, and 26 as Sundays. In 1932, those dates fell on Wednesdays.

Every newspaper that features a date has the wrong day of the week.

While discussing the obstacles facing the group in breaking out of the prison, Ludwig mentions "a 325 foot drop into a moat full of crocodiles". Crocodiles live in the tropics, they are cold blood species and can not live or at least be conscious in cold places.

Viewed in the direction of the cables with the station in the background, the cable car to Gabelmeister's peak runs in the symmetric midst between the cables when it should be on side of one of the cables. The way it is depicted in the movie, the two cable cars could never pass each other without colliding.

In one elevator scene, the operator holds the control handle in the middle, which is "Stop", and the elevator rises. In the next elevator scene the control is all the way forward, which is "Up."

When deputy Kovacs is trying to escape Jopling, he boards a bus and draws the shade down, revealing the reflection of Jopling on his motorcycle. When Kovacs raises the shade, the bike is still reflected, but when the bus begins to move forward, the reflection of the parked bike moves along at the same speed of the bus. It should remain in one place while the bus moves out of the frame.

Mr. Moustafa meets Young Author in 1968, and relates to him events which happened in 1932, 36 years ago. Zero is in his late teens or early 20's in 1932; Mr. Moustafa is clearly in his mid-to-late 70's. In real life, Mr. Moustafa would be in his mid-to-late 50's in 1968.

After the reading of Madame D.'s second will, articles in the Trans-Alpine Yodel newspaper are shown. The second, "Son of Murdered Countess Disappears Without Trace", has two paragraphs - which read the same, word for word.

M. Gustave calls a colleague from a phone booth, yet there are no wires connecting the phone booth to a telephone pole nor are there any telephone poles within the vicinity of the phone booth.

When the cabins stop next to each other at the top of the mountain, the cable of the second cabin goes down, but when the cabin stops at the end of the track, the cable goes up.

When the concierges are pulled away from their important duties, one concierge is administering modern CPR, which was invented in the 1960s. Promotion for non-medical professionals started in the 1970s.

In the beginning of the movie, during the author's conversation with the concierge, Monsieur Jean runs to a guest who is choking and uses the Heimlich maneuver, squeezing the guest's chest from behind. Dr. Henry Heimlich first described the Heimlich Maneuver in Journal of the American Medical Association in 1974.

The large kitchen in Lady D's castle is lit by fluorescent lamps. Though invented in the early 1930s, fluorescent lamps were not commercially available until after World War 2.

When Henckels is chasing them in the snow, it seems he uses an electric megaphone. Electric megaphones were not invented untill1954.

When Monsieur Gustave hears the news of Madame D's death, according to the newspaper, it is October 19th. He is arrested the next day, October 20th. A week later, on October 27, Zero visits him in prison, and his escape from prison takes so long that the scars and bruises on his face have completely disappeared. So when Jopling stops at the gas station in pursuit of them, according to the calendar on the wall, it cannot be October at all, unless no one has removed the old calendar sheet.

Kovacs says that Monsieur Gustave was claimed to have been seen on the evening of the October 19th, while the news of Madame D's death reached Monsieur Gustave, according to the newspaper and according to the text on the picture in the train scene, on the 19th of October. In this case, Monsieur Gustave can use the newspaper as evidence that the possible witnesses are lying.