Gaffes

Baxter gives Fran coffee to drink. The coffee is freshly made and so it's boiling hot, but she drinks it quickly, as if it had been sitting around for some time.

After Bud finds out that Ms. Kubelik was with Mr. Sheldrake, he leaves wearing his new hat, leaving his old hat behind. Later that night when he arrives home with the woman from the bar, his old hat is on the hat rack on the wall.

The frozen daiquiri in the cocktail lounge melts, reforms, and melts again. Also, the straw in it disappears and reappears.

After Baxter gets home for the first time, he cleans up by placing a large waste bucket of empty liquor bottles outside his apartment door. An hour later when he has to vacate the apartment for one of the other men, the waste bucket full of bottles is gone. There was no one around to carry his bottles away at that time of night.

The shaving cream on Baxter's faces changes between the bathroom and bedroom.

After Kirkeby leaves, Baxter goes to the kitchen, lights his oven, removes a TV dinner from the refrigerator, and puts it in the oven without bothering to set a temperature on the dial. Less than two minutes later, after taking his empty bottles to the hallway and speaking to the doctor, he returns to the kitchen and removes the TV dinner from the oven. Most TV dinners require at least thirty minutes in the oven at a set temperature. Even a modern microwave oven is unlikely to thoroughly cook a TV dinner in less than two minutes.

Baxter finds a piece of spaghetti on the tennis racket he had used earlier in the picture to strain a pot of pasta. While thinking he twirls the noodle around his finger. Pasta left out like that would have stiffened up. And he never would have been able to spin it.

The strand of spaghetti could have come from a meal he just cooked, not from the one he fixed Fran a week earlier.

When Miss Olsen picks up the extension after being fired, Sheldrake is heard completing dialing his call to Baxter. A rotary dialer will not work when an extension is off the hook.

The movie is set in 1959, a year when Christmas Day (December 25th) landed on a Friday. Yet the office is shown fully staffed the next day, which should be empty over the weekend.

C. C. Baxter suggests 5 feet 6.5 inches as the average height of a New Yorker, but given the large percentage of the 8 million-plus New Yorkers he cites (and which figure he uses as a multiplier) who are children, this is undoubtedly too high.

Baxter comes back to the apartment as his landlady tells him she smells gas. He also smells gas when he gets inside but when he goes into the kitchen he does nothing about it.

Actually, it's quite obvious that Baxter turns the gas off as the turns the knob at the top of the oven.

When Dr. Dreyfus calls to his wife that Baxter is at it again, then slams his apartment door shut, the wall shakes noticeably, revealing it to be a set, rather than a real wall.

At the finale as Fran is running up the stairs to Baxter's apartment, she hears a loud sound similar to a gun shot and rushes to his door and begins banging on it. When Baxter opens the door, he is holding a just opened bottle of champagne. But when the topper of a bottle of champagne is popped, it would never make such a sound.

When Fred MacMurry's son shoots the propeller toy in the air, it's airborne so long, it's is as if the living room has a 20 foot ceiling. Which as a studio set, it would.

When Fran cries in front of the mantel, someone can be seen reflected in the TV screen sitting and watching the scene play out.

The layout of Baxter's apartment makes no sense, especially in relation to Dr. Dreyfus's apartment. Dreyfus lives next to Baxter, which means their walls should be adjoining the full length of both flats. However, from inside Baxter's living room, one can see windows in both his kitchen and bedroom facing directly where the Dreyfus apartment should be (and there would likely be a window in the bathroom between the kitchen and bedroom). Dreyfus's apartment would have to veer immediately off to the extreme right when one enters it and be no more than a couple of inches wide in order to allow the kind of set-up seen in Baxter's apartment. This is clearly unrealistic, if not downright impossible.

During the opening pan of the New York skyline with the United Nations Building in the foreground, the shot is actually a "mirror-image" of the actual scene.

In the opening sequence, Jack Lemmon's character narrates that his name is C.C. Baxter, "'...C' for Calvin, 'C' for Clifford... But most people call me 'Bud'". However, throughout the movie, no one calls him "Bud". Miss Kubelik calls him "Mister Baxter", Mr. Sheldrake calls him "Baxter" and the other executives call him "Buddy Boy".

(Widescreen version only) The shadow of a boom mic is visible in the upper left portion of the screen as C. C. Baxter is rushing to open his apartment door after being alerted to an odor of gas by his landlady.

Mrs. Lieberman is in a panic, telling Baxter that she smells gas coming from his apartment. It is her building and a potentially dangerous situation, perhaps requiring the fire department or an ambulance, but she immediately loses interest in the problem after informing him and simply goes back downstairs.

Fran buys a record album recorded by the small combo that performs in the Chinese restaurant she patronizes, but when the record is played in Baxter's apartment, the tunes are lush orchestral arrangements, nothing like the lounge music heard in the café.

When Fran is in Jack Baxter's office during the Christmas party, she is wearing lipstick and and mascara. After Baxter puts his hat on and asks how he looks, she isn't wearing any makeup.

When Kirkeby returns to the apartment to look for the galoshes left behind by Sylvia, he first looks behind the chair to the right of the fireplace, then he goes to the left of the fireplace to look behind another chair, then he returns to the right of the fireplace, where he picks up the galoshes behind the chair where he already had looked when he first came in.

When telling the story of his attempted suicide, C. C. Baxter pantomimes loading a revolver, even though he has specified (and it is later seen) that the gun he used was an automatic.