A Retrospective: “Raiders of the Lost Ark”

The upcoming release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull fills me with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Anticipation at revisiting a childhood hero (the scene in the trailer where the fedora skips across the ground and the first few bars of the Raiders theme play send me back in time and I’m 9 years old again), and dread because I’m afraid it’ll suck and desecrate a beloved childhood memory. Raiders played a formative role in my life. I saw it in the theater, and spent the next 27 trying to become Indiana Jones. I’ve probably come as close any kid from Wisconsin has a right to. I’d hate to see all that poisoned by a crappy, late-series attempt to cash in on a franchise (do I even have to mention that I’m alluding to George Lucas? I didn’t think so).

So, I decided to take a look back at the other treasured trilogy of my youth. Do they still hold up or are the movies of my memories better than the ones on the DVDs? Let’s find out:

0:00:25—South America 1936

· There’s the Paramount logo worked into an establishing shot. They’ve done this in all the movies. I wonder how they’ll do it in the fourth one.

· Hey, there’s Alfred Molina as the traitorous guide Satipo. He’s all skinny and doesn’t have cybernetic tentacles.

· Best hero reveal ever.

· The whole setup with the cave and idol sets the tone of the film perfectly—at turns eerie, reverent, and swashbuckling.

· The boulder looked fake.

· Belloq is a great bad guy. How do you not get behind a movie with a hero in a fedora competing against an evil Frog with the power of God at stake?

· The theme kicks in. It must be the most famous movie music apart from, well, Star Wars…Jaws…hmmm, am I sensing a pattern here?

0:13:15—Back in the U.S.

· Good idea making Indy a mild-mannered archeology professor in his other life. Sort of like how in my other life I’m a mild-mannered…er…

· Denholm Elliot, we miss you.

· The scene with Army Intelligence setting up the Ark plotline is played perfectly straight. Hitler’s after a religious icon that can give him the power to rule the world? Okay. Cue ominous music.

· Love the packing scene: “You know what a cautious guy I am,” Indy says as he tosses his S&W .45 revolver into the suitcase.

0:25:10—Nepal, Marion, shootout

· Nepal. I have known where that place is since the fourth grade because of this movie.

· And we meet Marion Ravenwood. Gotta love a hard-drinking woman who can throw a punch (*coughtenfeetcough*)

· The dialogue between Indy and Marion is some first-rate, hardboiled guy-and-dame dialogue. I don’t remember the movie being as indebted to the pulp novels of the ‘30s as it obviously is.

· “I can only say ‘Im sorry’ so many times.”

· And then the Nazis came—where did Spielberg find the reincarnation of Peter Lorre to play Toht, the Gestapo officer.

· Indy saving Marion from the red-hot poker still stands as one of the most heroic scenes in cinema.

· How did Indy’s gun go from being a Smith & Wesson revolver to a Browning semi-automatic within the course of a scene? It wouldn’t be so bad except the guns look nothing alike.

· And why are the Nepalese thugs using MP-40 submachine guns that haven’t been invented yet? At least they’re carrying period-correct Mauser pistol.

· Spielberg uses no music during the whole sequence. How very ‘70s of him.

0:37:33—Cairo, market chase

· Cairo—another place I’ve known since the fourth grade. It’s a little troubling how much of my knowledge of geography was formed by pop culture.

· Yay! John Rhys-Davies.

· Cairo looks lovely.

· Goddamn, Ford must have been hot as hell in that jacket in Egypt in the summertime.

· The famous sword vs. pistol scene occurred because Ford was suffering from dysentery during the shoot and didn’t want to film another long fight scene. He asked why Indy didn’t just shoot the guy. Spielberg loved the idea and ran with it.

· Speaking of running, does anyone do the whole run-at-the-camera-then-skid-to-a-stop better than Ford? It’s another one of those things Spielberg picked up from the movies of the ‘40s.

0:42:11—Indy thinks Marion’s been killed.

· Indy copes with his grief and guilt by drinking alone. This is how a man deals with grief: he drinks and broods despite having easy access to firearms.

· Great conversation with Belloq in the bar. Indy’s staggering drunk. I didn’t catch that when I was 9. The dialogue still crackles, and doesn’t talk down to the audience. “We are both men of science, fallen from the pure faith.” Like you’d ever hear someone say that in Transformers.

· I love that Sallah’s kids rescue him. Even as a kid, the cleverness of that ploy stood out.

0:50:03—The map room, the dig, the Well of Souls

· Wow, the cinematography of Cairo is gorgeous. Spielberg really went out of his way to make sure that ever locale was remarkable. The night-time scenes in the translator’s shop (when he almost eats the poisoned dates) seem huddled and secretive. The overhead shots of Cairo show it as an alabaster maze of walled homes broken by the occasional gilded dome. A lesser director would have used some stock footage of the pyramids, then transitioned to generic interiors.

· The scene of Indy in the map room still conveys a sense of awe and wonder. Spielberg uses his inner-12 year-old’s sensibilities to the best effect here.

· More beautiful staging and cinematography. The scale of the Nazi’s archeological dig is impressive. Again, Spielberg could have skimped, but didn’t. And the shots of Indy’s dig are still breathtaking in their beauty (I’m thinking especially of Indy silhouetted by the setting sun, buffeted by the desert winds). Even the ones where a storm comes rolling in, and that are clearly bluescreen effects, and probably left over fro Close Encounters.

· Oooo! The snakes!

1:12:24—The Well of Souls, the fight at the German plane

· The scene of Marion dangling from a massive Anubis statue still looks breathtaking.

· Man, the interiors of the Well of Souls look good. All shadows and hieroglyphs and snakes.

· More understated humor in the fight with the German mechanic. Not enough to take the audience out of the picture, but enough to keep the movie fun and not mean-spirited—even when the guy gets hit by a propeller.

· I wonder why Spielberg used a flying-wing for these scenes. ‘Cause it looked cool?

1:23:32–The white stallion

· This is it. I am ecstatic to report that my favorite scene in the movie does indeed still hold up after all these years. Unlike the “Han Solo as the cavalry” scene at the end of Star Wars, which is hard to watch as an adult and not notice Ford’s wooden acting and Lucas’s clunky direction, this one still holds. “I dunno. I’m making it up as I go,” Indy wearily acknowledges. Cue the Raiders theme and Indiana Jones gallops through the Cairo market on a white Arabian stallion. The crowds cheer him as he chases the Nazis. This is the magic of the movie crystallized: the swashbuckling hero, riding boldly into the action to do what must be done. If a man can have one white stallion moment in his life, he’s lived well.

1:26:02—The truck scene

· Nice to see that one of the most famous action sequences in movie history still holds up. Aside from being a reminder of a time when movies didn’t assume their audiences have the attention-span of a parakeet, Spielberg plays this scene too perfectly straight. The punches look like they hurt. The truck gets rattled and damaged. The lack of CGI means everyone obeys the laws of physics. As a result, the over-the-top stunt sequence perfectly fits the narrative of the movie. You sorta buy it.

1:42:54—The tramp steamer, the march through the desert

· Captain Katanga is the only black character in the entire trilogy. An unfortunate consequence of setting your movies in ‘30s.

· More good moments between Marion and Indy as she tends to his injuries and grouses about it. Have I mentioned that I’m glad Karen Allen is coming back in the new one?

· “It’s not the years, darling, it’s the mileage.”

· Hey look! The U-boat from Das Boot has intercepted them.

· When Indy sees the U-boat he throws off a casual “Holy Shit!” Another thing that differentiated Indiana Jones from Han Solo, Buck Rogers, or any other heroes of my youth—Indy cursed like my father. Granted, he was doing it at the prospect of capture by the Nazis as opposed to Bart Starr calling a bonehead play, but still…

1:51:23—the march through the desert

· More period-problematic weaponry: Indy threatens to blow up the Ark with a Russian RPG-7 that weren’t around in 1936. He uses one in the trailer for the new one, too. Spielberg just loves the RPG-7.

· Belloq ate a fly!

· The final confrontation between Indy and Belloq where the evil Frenchman calls Indy’s bluff continues the great dialogue and realism.

1:55:44—Opening the Ark, the end

· Again, bucking the trend of typical summer movies, there’s no massive action climax. The climax is a show-stopper, no doubt about that, but it looks more like a dry-run for Poltergeist than the usual assaultive action climax.

· Nice payoff to the supernatural overtones Spielberg has been planting.

· And, of course, the final scene. Nice joke on us. It doesn’t much matter, since Indy get to walk off with Marion at the end. They both look spiffy in their pre-war outfits, too.

Final reflections: Well, it holds up. Yay! Of course nothing can move you like it did when you were nine, but there were moments watching Raiders that I felt the magic of cinema tug at me like it did then.

Mostly what I noticed is what a great piece of craftsmanship Raiders is. Even in, what was essentially a summer popcorn movie, Spielberg shows that he knows how to tell a story, deploying characters, pacing, action, and cinematography to maximum value. Raiders clock in at a solid two hours, but never feels either bloated or rushed. It has fewer action sequences than most current summer blockbusters, yet never gets boring. It has plenty of action, but never feels violent or mean-spirited. Compare it to the latest batch of summer movies—I’m thinking of movies like Transformers (in which Optimus Prime practically beats the audience into submission) and Pirates of the Caribbean, (which just keeps plodding along, presumably hoping the audience will develop some kind of cinematic Stockholm Syndrome and believe the delusion that the movie is good.)

So I turn to the rest of the trilogy—and the upcoming installment–with cautious optimism. Oh, and one final note: the DVD has been retroactively re-titled Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Presumably to keep Indy’s name in the title. This is a dumb, clunky, market-minded idea. I sense the cyborg claw of George Lucas in this.

Additional Links:

“A Retrospective: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”

“A Retrospective: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”

“This Summer’s Movies: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”