I watched "Revolutionary Road" tonight. I wasn't all that impressed with it as a movie, but that's just me, your mileage may vary. The purpose of this post, though, is that I had a difficult time concentrating on the movie (which is set in the summer of 1955), because I was so distracted by all the things wrong with the set decoration.
Regarding the telephones, in the office scene at Leonardo DiCaprio's desk, he has a 500 series key phone. On the very next desk, his co-worker had something I had never seen before. It appeared to be a 5300 series key phone. Either that, or it was a 500 series with an F1 handset on it. The case did look short, though. Either way, the phones should have been identical, and they weren't. Not a big deal though, because...
The real corker was the wall phone in their kitchen. It was a yellow 554. Now, from what I've gathered, the summer of 1955 would have been extremely early for the 554, and not many would have been found in average homes. The fact that it was yellow is another odd thing, because they weren't available at the start. All that can be excused, though, because even the most meticulous set designer isn't going to possess phone knowledge of that level. But here's the killer: The phone was MODULAR! My jaw dropped when I saw that. At least the office phones were old and hardwired, but there, in the kitchen, was an honest-to-goodness modular 554. What makes it really bad is that they showed Kate Winslet talking on the phone in a series of close-up shots, and you could plainly see the thin, flat cord that she was twisting in her hands, and the modular hole at the end of the handset. That sort of blunder is inexcusable.
There were radio/television problems, too. A table model phono sitting on a shelf inches away from a console radio-phono in the living room. Another radio-phono in the dining room, with a German radio right next to it. How many radios and record players did the set designers think people had in each room back then? Then there's the television with the puny rabbit ears. The antenna looked awfully cool sitting on the TV, but way out in the suburbs you'd need a rooftop antenna to pick anything up. Rabbit ears just wouldn't have cut it.
There have been so many other films in which they got all the period details right, that I know it was possible for a better job to have been done on this one. But as it was, none of the sets in this film rang true.