Another Old Movie, Some More Old Heraldry

So there I was, watching the 1936 movie Rembrandt, about the life of Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn and starring Charles Laughton, Gertrude Lawrence, and Elsa Lanchester, produced and directed by Alexander Korda.

And by golly, wouldn't you know it? There were a couple of scenes with heraldry in them!

The first was this great flag with the arms of Amsterdam:

You can click on the image above to see the full-size picture, which shows the arms surmounted by a crown and the lion supporters more clearly.

The arms of Amsterdam are remarkably identifiable. Here's a depiction I saw, and photographed, in Maastricht:

There was a later, interior scene which also had some coats of arms. Alas, the combination of old black-and-white movie, watched on a television screen, and photographed with my phone's camera, left them just a little too blurry to adequately identify.

If you click on the image above to go to the full-size version and then zoom in, it's possible to get an inkling of what some of the charges on the shields might be, as well as the crowns that ensign each shield.

But, alas, not quite sharp enough for me to be able to see if these are real Dutch arms, or something just created for Hollywood. And this was back in the days before "on-location" shooting.

Still, I have seen windows like this, with many clear glass panes containing a single coat of arms more or less central to the window in a number of places in the Low Countries, so it's certainly evocative of the Netherlands of the time. Here's a modern example, found in Antwerp, Belgium:

It is nice to see Hollywood, even back in the day, getting at least some of the heraldry right!