Gaffes

After Cole Harden wakes up and takes his gun belt, he holds both ends in his hands as he stumbles back the bedroom. After the cut, the belt is already strapped on.

Gary Cooper and the man who sold him the horse had a fight and Cooper removed the man's gun. It was on the second step leading to the bar and was pointing towards the street. In the next cut the gun was on the third step and pointing away from the street.

The town was named for George Langtry, an engineer and foreman who had supervised a Chinese work crew building the railroad, and not for the actress Lillie Langtry.

The farmers were portrayed as having filed homesteads to acquire their land in Texas when, in reality, there were no homesteaders in Texas. Because Texas, an independent republic, joined the Union in 1845 with full statehood status from the beginning and never went through territorial status, there was never any federal government-owned land in the state to be open under the Homestead Act.

The corn stalks would have to be dead and dry to burn as fast as they did.

Cole Harden seemingly rides his horse right into the raging fire. No horse would ever run into a fire.

A homesteader is hanged at the start of the movie. The rope is tied around the trunk of a tree, thrown over one of its branches, then put around the man's neck, who is sitting on a horse. When Bean swats at the horse to send the horse on its way and the man to his reward, the film shows Bean standing by the trunk. The swinging man causes the rope at the trunk to sway back and forth. But the dead weight of a hanged man could not cause the rope to sway so drastically between the branch and trunk. Though the rope from branch to the man would sway between the trunk and the branch, it would merely be straight and taught.

When the opera house's lights are turned down, the stage is dark, then the stage lights turn up and light the curtain. But in the 19th century, the stage lights would have been lamps that burned lime (hence the term, limelights). They were NOT electrical, which would allow all of them to turn up at the same time. Rather, they would have had to been lit individually before the performance, and they would have been burning at their brightest from the start. The theatre would not have wanted to take the time to either light them or turn them up at curtain time. Thus, when the house lights were turned down (by hand), the stage already would have been fully lit.