Once again, I find myself needing to get myself back in the Substack life again. So…
A couple of months ago, The Wife and I were looking for a movie to watch on Saturday night. (We usually take a break from regular teevee shows on Saturday nights, choosing instead to watch a movie.) We saw that the first four movies featuring swashbuckling archaeologist Indiana Jones were available on DisneyPlus, so for the next four weeks we watched them all, in succession. Here are a few thoughts about each one of those movies.
Ohhhh, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I wrote on my main site two years ago about the 40th anniversary of Raiders, and every word there stands. I won’t quote that piece extensively here, but I remain as thrilled and entertained by Raiders as I ever was. All of the movie’s set-pieces still land, and to this day I can detect very little artifice as I watch the movie unfold, even though I know things like how the shadow of the Ark on the wall is cast by a cardboard cut-out, and that the stuntman being dragged beneath the truck is being pulled along a specially-carved out depression in the road. The plot holes don’t vex me now any more than they ever did: Why do the Nazis switch the baskets? Did they have a plan to kidnap Marion? Did no one do the math and realize the measurements given for the Staff of Ra imply that Indy is 4 feet tall? And how does Indy survive the sub ride and then know not to look on the power of the Ark?
None of that matters now. Raiders remains what it always was: a movie with heroes and villains, nifty twists on the “treasure map” concept, chases, fights, a girl and an ally, nefarious figures in the shadows, and so on. What struck me this time, story-wise, is that Indy and Belloq have a real chess match going here, with neither man gaining a decisive edge until the end. Sometimes Indy scores a victory, but Bellow always answers. Until, of course, God gets involved. Belloq’s “transmitter for speaking to God” speech is totally prescient, except he never considers that God’s answer will be, “You are not worthy to speak to me.”
One thing that really stands out now, though, is the nature of Indy’s relationship with Marion. It’s been noted that when George Lucas was originally pitching the idea of his globe-trotting 1930s archaeologist hero to Steven Spielberg, he suggested that Mariond had been a teenager, and a young one at that, in their original relationship. Now, for whatever reason, the movie itself never states any ages at all. All we get is Marion’s line: “I was a child ! I was in love! It was wrong and you knew it!” Indy basically concedes the point, saying, “I did what I did. You don’t have to be happy about it, but maybe we can help each other out now.” I’ve heard this mentioned in a number of places recently, because with a new movie out, Indy is back in the pop-culture consciousness. My problem is that everyone seems to be taking as canonical gospel that Indy was 25 and Marion was 15 when they first came together, which is indeed pretty damned gross. There’s no way to gloss over that…
…except that those ages are never mentioned in the movie.
Not once.
I have no idea where those numbers came from or why they’re accepted, but I see no reason to grant them total veracity.
So, how old did I think they were? I confess that I never thought about this at all when I was nine and the movie first came out. More recently, I figured it was a graduate-assisant-and-an-undergrad thing, maybe a 24-year-old with an 18-year-old. Which is still gross, for many reasons, but I never saw any particular reason to assume Marion meant that she was literally a child. Maybe I’m thinking about this wrong, though. I brought this up on social media recently and someone pointed out the age difference between Harrison Ford and Karen Allen, but that’s not convincing. If you wonder why, look up the age difference between Mr. Ford and Sean Connery.
Ahhhh, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
I love the movie, but…the good parts of this movie have to work so hard to overcome the bad stuff in it, don’t they? And honestly, it’s mostly a matter of the movie’s timing and period that allows me to love it at all. I really think that 1984 is probably the very last time a movie this stereotypical if not downright racist could have been made and still manage to make me love it. Watching it recently reminded me of a Loony Tunes DVD set we own. This set contains some of the more obscure animated shorts from the Warners Studio, and as such, the set comes with a video disclaimer at the beginning of each disk, warning viewers of outdated attitudes on display in the cartoons to come. Basically, “This is the set where we put all the racist stuff, folks. We don’t want to bury this material, but…watch at your own risk.”
There really isn’t anything defensible to say about Temple’s depictions first of Chinese culture and then of Indian culture, or its endorsement of British colonialism in the character of Captain Blumburtt. The dinner scene is particularly absurd in its depiction of Indian food as utterly gross and outlandish, but I’ve read that this was a joke that didn’t work in the movie; the denizens of Pankot Palace, knowing that this is what Westerners think Indians eat, decide to oblige them. If that’s the intention of the scene, well, I’d never noticed it, so yeah: if it’s a joke it’s a complete misfire.
Actor Amrish Puri, who played the cult-leader villain Mola Ram in the movie, would later write in defense of the film:
It's based on an ancient cult that existed in India and was recreated like a fantasy. If you recall those imaginary places like Pankot Palace, starting with Shanghai, where the plane breaks down and the passengers use a raft to jump over it, slide down a hill and reach India, can this ever happen? But fantasies are fantasies, like our Panchatantra and folklore. I know we are sensitive about our cultural identity, but we do this to ourselves in our own films. It's only when some foreign directors do it that we start cribbing.
Perhaps Temple’s big error, then, is following too closely the example set by the serials of decades before that inspired it. A more obscure film, High Road to China, released in between these two movies, also committed some of the same errors in depicting the Subcontinent and the Far East cultures; the same errors can be found in short-lived teevee shows that tried capturing the Raiders-mania of the time (CBS’s Bring ‘Em Back Alive and ABC’s Tales of the Gold Monkey).
Setting all that aside, what struck me most on this rewatch of Temple is that in its structure, it’s actually an Indiana Jones movie grafted onto the form of a James Bond movie. We have the equivalent of the Bondian pre-credits sequence, in which we see Indy finish up a previous adventure (he even gets to enter a swanky nightclub wearing a tuxedo), before he’s plunged into the next adventure, the main one of the film. Indy gets a “mission briefing” about the problem he’s investigating (not from M in an office but from starving Indian villagers and their shaman-like leader, played by an experienced Sri Lankan actor. At least the film actually casts actors from the Subcontinent, which has had a bustling film industry for many years; if the story itself too often steers uncomfortably close to outright racism, at least they avoided repeating mistakes like casting white Frenchmen as Afghan princes (Octopussy) or a Mexican actor as, again, an Asian prince (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan).
Much as Bond always does, Indy travels to the villain’s lair and meets the villain in a dinner scene, before he starts learning the truth about the villain’s schemes and, after a bunch of brushes with death, manages to defeat the bad guy and foil his plot. This Bondian structure stood out to me not just because of all the thinking about James Bond I’ve done the last few years, but also because I remember the origins of Indiana Jones in the first place: Spielberg met with George Lucas when the latter was on vacation after the release of Star Wars, and Spielberg noted that he wanted to do a Bond movie but there was no way the Eon Productions folks would let him, as an American, do one. So Lucas brought out the idea he’d been kicking around while he’d been making his “little space adventure” movie: a globe-trotting archaeologist from the 1930s.
So Indy started out, at least in part, as an answer to James Bond; and here in Temple of Doom he had his most Bond-like adventure.
Lots of fans put Willie Scott, the Kate Capshaw character, in the “negative” column when discussing this movie, but I actually have always liked her a whole lot. They couldn’t just give Indy another Marion Ravenwood in the sequel, could they? Instead they have him with this woman whom he meets entirely incidentally, who has no entry point at all to discussing Indy’s adventures, and who has no particular inclination toward the kind of thing Indy does for a living. It’s all right out of the old Hollywood tropes—a man and a woman from completely different walks of life are put together, involuntarily, into an adventure—and if Willie does maybe do a bit too much screaming throughout, well, I’m fine with that, particularly in the “bug” scene, where her screaming is leavened by Harrison Ford’s iconic delivery of the line “We. Are going. To DIE!”, followed by a Ford grimace where he’s more annoyed than fearful.
Of course, the most un-Bondian element of Temple of Doom is Short Round, the kid who is somehow Indy’s best friend and co-adventurer through all of this. It’s hard not to wonder, at least for a minute or two, where Shorty is in Raiders—presumably he couldn’t get out of school that day—but I’ve never once been bothered by his presence in this movie. It’s to the script’s credit that Shorty is never gratuitously in harm’s way just because “Oh no, you can’t hurt the kid!” He’s a full participant in the adventure, and Ke Huy Quan is a terrific actor. I mean, dude just won an Oscar!
Ahhhh, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
I’ve noticed a lot of people putting this one at the top of their personal rankings of the Indy movies, and I can understand that…but it’s never been at the top of mine. My personal ranking follows the release order of the films, so I actually like Temple more than Crusade, and ultimately it’s because Crusade turns out to basically be a sanitized version of Raiders. I mean: Indy is tasked with finding a sacred Christian relic which the Nazis are also searching for (the Ark, the Grail), and the key to finding it lies with a figure from Indy’s past with whom he has a strained relationship (Abner Ravenwood, Professor Henry Jones). The pursuit ends up in the deserts of the Middle East, where, after a big chase set-piece, Indy and the Nazis are confronted with the power of the relic in question, and the Nazis are defeated by their inability to understand it. Along the way Indy gets help from old friends (Marcus Brody, Sallah).
Crusade opens with a mini-adventure, set in 1912, featuring River Phoenix as young Indiana Jones. In the course of this set-piece, we get the full origin story of Indiana Jones: his insistence on bringing relics to a museum, the scar on his chin, his use of a whip, his fear of snakes, all of it. Maybe it’s a bit much, but it works pretty well as a fun sequence in itself, but since this is young Indy, we can’t really have him killing anyone yet, so the sequence is pretty bloodless…and really, most of the action in the film is pretty bloodless. Crusade always feels tame to me, for some reason, like it’s pulling its punches, perhaps as an over-reaction against the occasionally over-the-top violence of Temple.
Crusade also doesn’t do right by its characters, for the most part (one exception, though). Elsa, the “heroine” this time around, turns out to be a Nazi, so in fact a villain—but the movie tries to have it both ways with her, showing her weeping at the Nazi book-burning and the killing of the guy from the secret order tasked for a thousand years with keeping the Grail safe and hidden. She helps defeat the movie’s villain by giving him the wrong Grail to drink from, but then she dies because she can’t give up the real Grail. Her wavering loyalties and motivations are never clarified or made convincing.
Faring even worse are Sallah and Brody, the two returning allies of Indy from Raiders. Now, even though we didn’t get to see much of Brody in the first film, the script really does imply that Brody is an older version of Indy whose adventuring days are over; he expresses regret that he can’t be going after the Ark himself. Sallah, also, is shown as being competent and wise in the first film; Indy says “You’re the best digger in Egypt,” and Sallah has several moments in which he is indispensable to Indy’s work at recovering the Ark. In Crusade, though, both characters are reduced to comic relief at best or bumbling fools at worst. The desert chase in Crusade is somewhat marred by Brody’s nitwit-like babbling—do we really need him making jokes about the pen being mightier than the sword?—and the movie even ends with one last joke at Brody’s expense. Every time I watch this movie, the tone with Brody grates on my nerves. The character, and Denholm Elliot, deserved better.
I think that what Crusade does get one relationship right; in fact, it gets the father-and-son thing between Sean Connery and Harrison Ford so perfectly right (well, almost, I could personally do without the Oedipal stuff with them both bedding Elsa) that I think this is the main reason why Crusade is as beloved as it is. Connery and Ford have the kind of chemistry that filmmakers dream of capturing in a movie just once in their careers, and every scene of them conversing is utterly golden. It’s even easy to forgive the movie’s over-reliance on physical comedy when you have these two actors demonstrating such perfect timing, such as when Prof. Jones takes the gun of the biplane and ends up shooting their own tail-flap apart. And if the movie has the cheek to invent a quote by Charlemagne just to give Indy a moment to look on his father with admiration for the first time probably in decades, well…that’s forgivable.
Crusade does have a bit of sentiment going for it, for me personally. It came out in 1989, which was the year I graduated high school; in a very real way, seeing it felt like a farewell of sorts to another foundational thing from my youth. I kept my love of Indy, though: I know what St. Paul wrote, but really, putting away your childish things isn’t always a great idea, is it?
Ahhhhhh, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
OK, we figured we were done with Indiana Jones after Last Crusade, didn’t we? It was a trilogy, and there were no rumblings about any more movies to come. There was a short-lived teevee show a couple years later called The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, in which George Lucas tried to blend Indy’s adventures into a quasi-educational format featuring various events and people from history. I never watched it, as it was airing while I was in college and those years were pretty much a pop-cultural black hole for me, except for summer movies and Star Trek. It wasn’t until well into the 2000s that rumblings about a fourth Indiana Jones movie started firing up…and then, finally, 2008 brought us Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Now, why is the title so cumbersome? Why not just Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull? I don’t know. The focus is, I suppose, on the actual beings who created the skull and not the skull itself, but that’s not a crucial distinction, is it? The movie’s development is something of a story in itself: it took years for multiple writers to get a script together that made everybody “happy”, but when you dig down into it, you get the feeling that nobody was really happy with the script and that they—Spielberg, Lucas, Harrison Ford—all basically said, “It’s this script or we’re not getting this done.” So into production the script went.
Crystal Skull is probably by consensus the world’s least favorite Indy movie (well, maybe not anymore, but I’m not sure what the general feeling on Dial of Destiny is, and I haven’t even seen it yet, so my personal jury is out), for quite a few reasons. Ultimately I think it boils down to the movie just not feeling right. I was surprised to find myself actually enjoying it quite a bit during our most recent re-watch, but still…there really does feel like something’s not quite right with it. My general suspicion is that the script probably needed one more pass by someone really good. There’s no reason why this story and the elements within it can’t work; I have no problem with the movie on a conceptual basis.
Crystal Skull takes place in 1957, a full nineteen years after Last Crusade, so naturally we can’t have 1930s-style serial adventures anymore. Indiana Jones is himself now a man who, maybe, has been left behind by time…and the film’s opening act establishes this quite clearly. Our enemies are no longer Nazis but rather Soviets. The movie nicely taps into 1950s Cold War paranoia by showing a Soviet plot to actually infiltrate a top secret US Army Intel warehouse to recover…something, and they have captured Indiana Jones to help them do it (along with his “old friend” whom we’ve never met, but more on him in a bit). Indy escapes using all his old derring-do skills, but then, in a sequence that’s way more effective than people remember because the world has chosen to mock the way the sequence ends, Indy finds himself in a nice quiet neighborhood where he looks for help…only to realize that the neighborhood is fake, the people there are literal dummies, and that he’s wandered onto a nuclear bomb test site.
What happens next is iconic for all the bad reasons. Yes, it’s the “Nuke the fridge” moment, in which Indy survives the blast by hiding inside a lead-lined refrigerator. Now, honestly, the part of this that bothers me isn’t Indy hiding there or the fridge shielding him; it’s the fridge getting blasted across something like two miles of desert landscape before it comes to a rest and Indy pops out, a bit woozy but uninjured. Sorry, but you tumble a human like that inside a fridge, and what’s coming out is not in one piece. But the shot that follows, of Indiana Jones standing in the desert, silhouetted in the foreground as he looks on a gigantic mushroom cloud, is one of the more striking visuals in any Indiana Jones movie.
I really don’t have a problem with Indiana Jones being pushed forward in time into a 1950s sci-fi movie like THEM! or It Came From Outer Space. This is just as appropriate as the recent James Bond movies taking on the trappings, at least in part, of modern cyberthrillers. I just don’t think the movie really nailed that tonal shift very well at all. Soon Indy is off to South America, and there are ancient temples and chases through the rain forest and puzzles that rely on Indy’s knowledge to circumvent and all the rest of the usual trappings. It’s only at the film’s ending do we get back to the sci-fi stuff, which is why it doesn’t feel terribly convincing…well, that and the fact that since Steven Spielberg didn’t want aliens in an Indy movie (and I simply do not understand why not), they wound up going with “inter-dimensional beings” or some such thing.
Crystal Skull also has too many characters in it. There’s a teenager named Mutt who recruits Indy. There’s an old teacher-mentor of Indy’s. Apparently Indy has a new “old friend” who was a spy with Indy during World War II but is now a double-agent or a triple-agent or who knows what, by the time he’s done double-crossing the last person he double-crossed. And there’s Marion Ravenwood. By the time we get to the last act, the whole thing feels rather bloated, and Indy himself is rendered oddly passive in the final act. I know, it’s a tradition in these movies for the villain to be undone by the very power they are seeking to control, but the very real feel that Indy could have just not done anything at all for much of the movie’s second half does not help.
Also, I don’t know if Crystal Skull has too much CGI or what, but this movie just doesn’t look right to me. Douglas Slocombe, the cinematographer on the first three films, was in his 90s by this point and had long since retired, and Spielberg had settled into his permanent parternship with Janusz Kaminski by then. Kaminski has indicated that he studied Slocombe’s style and shot the film similarly, but I’m not sure how successful he was. Much of the movie has a soft look, almost as if sequences set outdoors were shot, in fact, on a soundstage.
But even so, I found Crystal Skull more engaging this time around than I did the last time I watched it…and in turn the time before that. I really think the movie has more going for it than many seem to believe.
I also think it should have ended differently:
The wedding is over; Indy and Marion are accepting congratulations. Mutt is taking pictures when the doors to the church blow open, and Indy’s hat is knocked from the hat rack and rolls to Mutt’s feet. Mutt picks it up. All turn to the door, where a SHADOWY FIGURE stands. The FIGURE enters…it’s a Western-Union telegram guy.
WESTERN UNION GUY: I have a telegram here for…Dr. Indiana Jones?
INDY: That’s me.
Indy takes the telegram and reads it:
INDY: "Dear Dr. Jones, stop. I’ve found it, stop. Come at once, stop.” It’s signed, “Dr. Wan Li.”
MUTT: What did they find?
INDY: The tomb of Genghis Khan.
MARION: Who is Wan Li?
INDY: (grins) Short Round. (to Mutt) I’m gonna need my hat.
(Credits roll)
As for the newest movie? Well…I’ll report back on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny when I’ve seen it. Until then….[hums the Raiders March to myself]
-Exeunt,
—K.