Dr Henry Jones Sr costume (pic heavy)

I searched the RPF and found short threads about the bag and glasses but I didn't find a more comprehensive thread. I apologise if it already exists.

The starting point, in addition to screen shots and photos of screen-used items which have come up for auction, is the excellent page on The Suits Of James Bond:

http://www.bondsuits.com/indiana-jones-and-the-last-crusade-sean-connerys-brown-herringbone-suit/

There are two issues in obtaining a suit of the correct colour:

1) the suit appears a different colour in nearly every shot. Due to lighting conditions it varies from a pale slate grey to a chocolate brown and everything between.

2) one should be aware of the different ways that Americans and British name tweed-colours. The colour of the Dr Jones Sr suit, as best I can determine, is the colour of tweed called 'brown' in Britain, which Americans would consider to be halfway between grey and brown, or taupe.

Here's a couple screen shots which give a nice overview of the costume:






Then there are various posed publicity sittings. This photo is one of a series which was taken in Northern California at the time the motorcycle chase was filmed. Sean Connery is wearing non-costume shoes because his feet aren't seen.



There is also a series taken at Petra



Note how the hat is blocked in these Petra photos, and that the various pieces of the suit don't quite match. Note also that he is missing his pocket watch strap.



Then there's the series of photos with a desert background. Perhaps it's merely the lighting, but his hat appears to be a bit lighter tweed, and is blocked differently as well. Here the pocket watch strap is present.



Next are costume pieces which have come up for auction. I don't quite know what to make of these.

Here the pants are clearly a different fabric that the jacket.



Here the bow tie is not the type used in the film.



A hat, which looks far lighter than the extremely dark tweed hat seen in most scenes of the film:

Now to focus in on some of the details.

The waistcoat. Note that it has four functional pockets, the upper two welted and the lower two flapped. There is a vertical buttonhole for the pocket watch strap. Also note the distinctive shape of the pen's clip.





The back of the waistcoat is grey with a subtle stripe pattern.





There are shots taken on set showing Connery sans waistcoat. In some he's wearing these claret braces with brown leather fittings. They form an "X" rather than a "Y" in back.

In other shots he's not wearing braces.



Here's a shot where the French cuffs of the shirt, the cufflinks, and the cuff treatment of the jacket can all be seen



The tie: a diamond point wide bow tie, extremely dark blue (which usually appears black on screen).



The tie's design is not polka dots, but rather these rounded squares, suggestive of quatrefoils, in brown.

Here you can clearly see the shirt's stripe pattern.



The shoes.
They can best be seen near the end of the film:



This style is called punch-cap, or punched cap-toe, Oxfords and the colour is variously called Oxblood, Burgundy, or Merlot.

The bag and umbrella.

Here you can see that the umbrella is misshapen when opened.



A lovely photo of the bag and umbrella.



Notice the wood on the tip of the umbrella is lighter than the wood of the handle.

The bag appears to be black, or an extremely dark brown like Oxblood. For some reason it's always depicted as being a mid-brown.





Just for reference here are three vintage bags of similar style (but the wrong colour of course)








The reverse of the same bag. Note the straps on the bottom.

The hat, glasses, and watch.

The hat is a heavy tweed like Harris Tweed, dark brown and black houndtooth. Due to the variety of lighting conditions the hat's colour appears to vary from scene to scene, from a mid-brown to nearly solid black.

I've looked at hundreds of new and vintage hats of this general style (variously called bucket, Elgin, grouse, Trilby, Eske, Highgrove, and fisherman's) and the structure of Dr Jones' hat is a bit unusual in that there are usually one or two seams in the front of the hat's body. Here the body has the seams on the sides, the front being one unbroken piece, the top being a separate oval piece.

The brim has the pattern diagonally oriented, the band has the pattern horizontally oriented matching the hat's body.

Here is an excellent photo showing the hat and glasses.



Another clear view of the glasses. The lenses are a complex rounded rectangle with flattish bottoms. In some scenes the bottoms of the lenses look like they have a straight cutoff.

BTW while these rimless glasses were very popular in the period, AFAIK they weren't made this big. I've seen hundreds of vintage glasses from the period and the lenses are always on the small side.




Here's a purported film-used pair of glasses and watch. The "hero" glasses have the C shaped springs that go around the ears.



We see the watch twice in the film, first in the biplane scene, then in the motorcycle scene.

They're different watches! Both said to be Jean Pierre and similar in style, but an open face watch in the biplane and a Full Hunter case watch in the motorcycle sidecar.



What we can plainly see is the strap. Nowadays we always show people back then wearing chains but in fact straps were very popular. (The strap goes through a special vertical buttonhole in the waistcoat.)

This photo shows that the strap is quite long. The vintage straps I see are much shorter.



I've seen vintage watch-straps in satin but they're usually leather. The way they're made is somewhat complex.

Here's a vintage watch with strap and fob to show how the short leather straps one usually sees are constructed.

Now to places to find all of these things.

The Suit.

Due to my large size (I'm 6'4", one inch taller than Sean Connery) vintage suits are impossible to find. So I had to look at bespoke options.

Magnoli has the "Princeton Suit" which is obviously based on the Dr Jones Sr suit (he taught at Princeton). However the waistcoat shown has lapels (the movie waistcoat does not) and it has four welted pockets (the movie waistcoat has two welted upper pockets and two flapped lower pockets). The fabric shown is not the herringbone tweed of the movie suit. I contacted Magnoli and they said they could make a screen-accurate suit. The Princeton Suit costs over $900US.

Princeton Tweed Suit by Magnoli Clothiers

A much less expensive alternative is the "dark brown" herringbone tweed suit from Studio Suits.

Vintage Dark Brown Herringbone Tweed Suit : StudioSuits: Made To Measure Custom Suits, Customize Suits, Jackets and Trousers

We here in the USA would call this colour "taupe", halfway between brown and grey, and certainly "dark brown" conjures up a quite different image to Americans. Yet this suit's colour and fabric is pretty much bang-on.

It's a bespoke suit and you can customise each detail. This is the suit I ordered, with three-button cuffs, lack of rear vent, ticket pocket, trousers with no belt loops (you wear braces), and waistcoat with six buttons, two upper welt pockets, two lower flap pockets, all pockets functional. These details brought the price to just under $400 which is still quite reasonable.

Here is my suit from Studio Suits. It's darker than it looks here due to photographing it against dark cloth.



The Hat.

I looked at hundreds of vintage and new tweed hats on Ebay and elsewhere and couldn't find anything close. One problem is that I wear size 61. Vintage hats are rarely seen in that size.

Step in Cherry Pat Hats on Etsy. She is a delight to work with. I sent her photos and she developed a screen-accurate pattern. I sent her two vintage Harris Tweed jackets I picked up on Ebay, one a brown houndstooth, one a very dark houndstooth. (The hat appears to be different shapes and colours in different scenes.)

Here are my two Cherry Pat Hats.

Each length of Harris Tweed has a unique code number and she removed the labels from the jackets and sewed them into the hats, a very nice authentic touch.





The Shirt.

Look for spread collar, French cuffs, white with "tonal stripes" or "tonal-stripe" fabric.

Here is one:

Cremieux Non-Iron Classic-Fit Spread-Collar Tonal-Stripe Dress Shirt | Dillard's

The Tie.

Alas I have looked through hundreds of new and vintage ties and not found a close match. One problem is that all the sites I've come across offer narrow diamond point ties and wide butterfly ties with straight ends, but not what we need, a butterfly-width tie with diamond point ends.

The tie I wear is a vintage Brooks Brothers tie with very nice colours and pattern and width and floppiness, but lacks the diamond point ends.

The Glasses.

Vintage rimless glasses are on Ebay all the time, for little money. It's not difficult to find frames very close to the Dr Jones frames. Mine cost $6 on Ebay. But you will find that the original lenses are far too small. My optometrist put in non-prescription lenses according to a drawing I did from the screen shot seen in a post above.

The Shoes.

These are the easiest part of the costume to find, burgundy punched-cap-toe Oxfords. (Even in 14!)

Here are modern shoes very close to the film shoes.



The Umbrella.

What British gentleman would be complete without his brolly? Yes it should be a nice vintage umbrella from the 1930s, but this $20 modern umbrella from Macy's looks very close.

https://www.macys.com/shop/product/...MI8oT9zpiL2gIVw5R-Ch1SJw25EAYYASABEgLr4vD_BwE

I switched out the Velcro fastener for a snap. I'm not sure if snaps were used in the 1930s but I don't know what sort of fastener to use otherwise.

The Watch, Strap, and Fob.

I'm the practical sort so I wanted a modern working pocket watch. I got a smallish light-weight one with open face, for comfort and convenience.

I made the strap from leather, and a buckle got from a shop in England.

About the fob, as I recall you never see it. But I thought this fob would be very appropriate. It's an original souvenir from the 1926 International Eucharistic Congress held in Chicago. It was the first time the Congress was held on US soil, and I can see Dr Jones, given his obsession with the Grail, travelling out to witness the spectacle of vast crowds adoring the Eucharist.



The reverse looks uncannily like one of the drawings in the Grail Diary.



The Pen.

When I put together this costume I was basing everything on whatever photos I could find online. I looked at hundreds of vintage pens on Ebay, trying to match the portion of the pen which shows when the pen is in Connery's pocket. I had forgot about the scene where he takes out the pen (having not seen the movie since 1989) so I wasn't concerned about the appearance of the portion of the pen you don't see.

I finally found this near-perfect match. The bonus is that it's a working ballpoint pen, for those times when one needs a pen at ComicCon.

Here it is in the pocket of my waistcoat.



And a screen shot showing the original pen



My pen was made in Germany and came as part of a set including a fountain pen and a ballpoint pen.



My Dr Jones Sr costume, some silliness at WonderCon last weekend.



At Disneyland

Pretty comprehensive.

Just as a side note: are you sure there's something wrong with the umbrella when opened? I remember that shot being pretty windy and that might just be the wind pushing it out of shape.

I'm pretty sure I remember reading that his shirt is a very pale green.

Nice, I think I saw you walking up the stairs at Wondercon on Sunday. I thought that it was pretty neat and you caught my idea really quick since you don't normally see any one dressed as Sr.

Indy Magnoli said:

I'm pretty sure I remember reading that his shirt is a very pale green.

Click to expand...

It would be great to find that article. The Suits Of James Bond describes it as white (off-white with white stripes) and it certainly looks white in all the photos. But I know how that goes, the tie looks black in most screen shots yet is an extremely dark blue.

I believe it was from an auction, but I can't seem to find any record of it in my files. Sorry!

Riceball said:

Nice, I think I saw you walking up the stairs at Wondercon on Sunday. I thought that it was pretty neat and you caught my idea really quick since you don't normally see any one dressed as Sr.

Click to expand...

Same, I saw OP at Wondercon as well, got a pic of him, I was dressed as Jr. That day.

Honestly, you’re one of those awesome guys everyone here wishes to have as uncle( ok, at least me[emoji6][emoji23][emoji51]) great work !!!

Thanks!
I am the favourite Uncle... because I work at Disneyland and get the nieces and nephews in free

Now about the difficulty of the tie. I found this listing on Etsy. They take an ordinary long tie and convert it into a bow tie.

This makes finding a matching-fabric vintage tie on Ebay a thousand times easier (literally). There must be a thousand vintage long ties for every vintage bow tie.

Here's the listing

Custom Bow Tie from Standard Necktie Convert a Necktie to a | Etsy

Now to re-visit the film tie



Finding the exact fabric, or even anything close, has been elusive. I've looked at hundreds of vintage ties on Ebay and elsewhere.

Here's what I currently wear, an ordinary long tie which I had converted into a bow tie by ClassicBowTies on Etsy. Dots instead of squares, but it's the closest tie I could find.



This is the closest tie I've been able to locate

You're also going to need a tie with a MUCH smaller pattern. Henry's bowtie has seven squares in the width of the tie (which is probably no more than 2" wide), but that top necktie has the same number is what's probably closer to a 4" wide blade. This is a great idea, but you'll want to find a candidate that has at least 12-15 squares at the widest point to convert to an accurate bowtie.

If our bowties were better sellers in general, I would LOVE to do a run of these... just not sure that the demand is there.

Good point and something I hadn't measured.

But then again, without knowing the exact width of the film tie we can only approximate.

I don't know what to make of this tie, which was part of a supposed film-used suit which came up on auction. The fabric looks like it could be the same as the film tie, yet it looks too wide and also appears to lack diamond points.



EDIT:

As Indy Magnoli suggests, to find the right fabric one has to match the scale of the pattern as closely as possible.

In this photo I count 8 squares at the widest point.



Now, what might be the width of the film tie? It strikes me as being a bit on the wide side. Indy suggests 2" which could well be correct, but I think it could possibly be as wide as 2.5" due to Sean Connery's size (I have read that he is 6 foot 2.5 inches tall).

Just to give a notion of scale, the tie I'm wearing is 3.5" wide, and I am 6 foot 3.5 inches tall.

Vintage long ties being sold do often give the width at the widest point, which allows us to estimate what scale of pattern we need.

I'd say that it's just a "close enough" someone had handy and through into the lot (or on the mannequin for the shot)?

Some updates with additional photos and information.

One thing I didn't talk about was his bloody shirt.

Sorry for the small image sizes, but I've only seen a couple photos showing it, evidently on location at Petra.





What's interesting are the spots of blood on his left sleeve that can be seen in the "rescue Indiana" scene below, which appear to migrate to his right sleeve above.

Also these images of the Hero Prop hat.

It's very difficult to reconcile this shape, with the strongly sloping brim (which can be seen in the biplane scene) with the wider more open brim seen for example in the motorcycle chase sequence.

If I remember correctly, the shirt was listed in an auction at one point as "green"... guessing it was a very pale green?

Back to the tie, it's interesting how it's arranged so differently in different scenes.



Here's my latest tie, a charity shop find for $3.

It has the four-part hollow motif, though not quite the right shape, and more gold than brown.

It's a nice floppy silk Brooks Brothers tie so I can get it into some of the shapes Henry has in the film.