Goofs for
Doctor Zhivago (1965)

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• Errors in geography: Urals are gradually rising mountains, not snowcapped peaks visible from perfectly flat steppes.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: Director David Lean reflected in the glass door as Yuri gets off a trolley and enters a house.
  
  
• Continuity: The city railroad scenes were filmed in Spain, and many of the forest railroad scenes were filmed in Finland; in both of those countries, most of the railroad track is broad gauge (the rails are more than 5 feet apart). The plains and mountains railroad scenes were largely shot in Canada, where the rails are "standard gauge": 4' 8 & 1/2" apart. The rails can be seen to jump between far apart and closer together more than once as the movie progresses.
  
  

• Audio/visual unsynchronized: During the "peaceful protest" scene, in a close-up of the crowd the mouth movements don't match the soundtrack.
  
  
• Factual errors: When Yevgraf gives Tonya the book with poems, it has its author listed by initials only. He says that he's not the author and that Y. A. Zhivago stands for Yuri Andreevich Zhivago. But the book is clearly written in Cyrillic, and so Yevgraf's name starts with a letter "Ye", while Yuri's name starts with a letter "Yu", which are two different letters. Tonya couldn't possibly mistake Yevgraf for the poems' author.
  
  
• Continuity: The book on the table in front of Tonya changes position and its cover rises a bit when Yevgraf sits down.
  
  
• Continuity: When Komarovsky meets Lara and she is wearing a red dress, he forces her to drink holding her fist. In the following shot he is pushing her drinking cup with his fingers.
  
  
• Continuity: While Katya plays with a toy horse, Yuri is sitting behind her with his head turned to his right-hand side. In the subsequent shot his head is turned to the left.
  
  
• Continuity: When Yuri, Lara and her daughter are riding in the sleigh on the way to the ice palace, the close-up shots show the three of them in the sleigh. In the wide shot where the sleigh goes over a bump, there is only one driver in the sleigh and no passengers.
  
  
• Factual errors: When a near-frozen Zhivago gets back to civilization after deserting the Red Partisans, he is almost run over by a train. After jumping out of the way, he asks a man in front of the train station where he is. The sign in Cyrillic on the station reads (due to transposed letters) "Yuryaitin", not "Yuriyatin".
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: During the scenes portraying the protest parade and the subsequent attack of the soldiers, it is supposed to be a bitterly cold night but there are no visible breath clouds from humans or horses which proves that the scenes were filmed in a warm environment.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: In the deserters scene, after the speaking officer is shot and falls in the water barrel, several of the extras can clearly be heard speaking Spanish.
  
  
• Miscellaneous: In the final scene, Zhivago's daughter and her fiancé walk away from the camera to the right, toward a modern dam. In the lower left foreground you see a Russian policeman, car and a motorcycle. You can see that they are actually part of a photograph that was pasted into the scene to fill the space.
  
  
• Factual errors: During protest parade the text on the banner reads "Svoboda i bratsvo" (Freedom and Fraternity), instead of "Svoboda i bratstvo".
  
  
• Factual errors: Much of the Cyrillic lettering in the film is inaccurate, as it relied on the post-Soviet version of Cyrillic rather than the version which had been used in Tsarist Russia. One of Lean's assistants tried to point this out to him, but Lean ignored him.
  
  
• Anachronisms: In an early scene (pre-Revolution), Komarovsky says to Lara, "I want to avoid Kropotkin Street." Before the Revolution, this street was called Prechistenka. Kropotkin was an anarchist, and there would never have been a street named for him in Tsarist Russia.
  
  
• Anachronisms: In the scene where Dr. Zhivago first arrives in Moscow (near the beginning of the movie). He is boarding a tram on Tverskaya street. In the background, is a statue of Yuri Dolgoruky, the founder of Moscow in 1147. The statue was placed there in 1947 on the 800th anniversary of Moscow's founding. It wasn't there before the Bolshevik revolution, the time during which the scene is supposed to have taken place.
  
  

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