“Raiders of the Lost Ark”
1981 • 1h 55mins • PG • Rent it • Buy it
Welcome to part one of Pardon My Franch: Indiana Jones. It’s a 3-part look at the development of the Indiana Jones franchise. From unknown to omnipresent. Tonight we’re cracking the whip with Spielberg’s original send-up of ’30s and ‘40s serials. It’s none other than 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Here’s the plot. Archeologist-in-air-quotes Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) liberates a gold idol from a Peruvian temple, leading to the death of double-crossing hired hand Satipo (Alfred Molina). He outruns a giant boulder but not rival Rene Belloq (Paul Freeman), who takes the artifact. Back at school where he’s inexplicably a professor, Jones learns Nazis are after the Jewish Ark of the Covenant. For our purposes here, it’s just a Big God Gun. They don’t know what it does, but they’re definitely going to point it at someone. Only Indy’s unique brand of Laura Croft-like tomb-raiding can save the Ark/day/world. He’ll reunite with Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) in Nepal, Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) in Cairo, and the villains in the Aegean Sea. Can Indy and company nab the Ark before the baddies? Can they learn to trust again after Indy’s checkered past and a Nazi monkey? And will there be snakes? Why does it always have to be snakes?
Here’s how it happened. In ’73, George Lucas saw a poster. The hero was jumping off a horse onto a truck. Really, that’s this whole movie, isn’t it? It look Lucas back to Buck Rogers and Zorro serial adventures. He wanted to make one himself, but for now. Lucas moved on to Star Wars, shelving the idea. Later he pitched it to his pal Steven Spielberg, who wanted to make a James Bond movie. A few months later, Spielberg was onboard to direct.
Who is Indy? For Lucas, he was a cowboy adventurer. A lone hero doing stunts, all self-confidence and physicality. For Spielberg, he was Agent 007, hence the mystery, the sneaking, the puzzling it all together. For Marion, he’s a lonely dirtbag who did her wrong once before and isn’t to be trusted. For Sallah, he’s a jangly hero who’s fun to spin folklore about.
For us, Indiana Jones is an implausible but highly watchable character. The learned classroom teacher who’s also a mercenary archeologist with a pistol, a Nazi-socking right hook and no schedule to keep. He is sensitive to historical relics but not to women, native people groups or government regulation. He’s smart enough to suss out the Ark’s resting place, yet easily bamboozled by a German shell game involving a human woman and large woven baskets. He’s an idiosyncratic human action bias who shouldn’t exist. But he’s sure something to see.
What did folks make of this in ’81? It opened in mid-June at #1 and went on to spend forty-something weeks straight in the top ten. That’s right: It played for most of a year. It was the year’s best money-maker. Movie-goers and critics loved it. The cast, the effects, the momentum, all of it. It landed as what it was—a riff on old serials—but got compared to comic books too. Its international appeal bested its ’81 rivals too. Worldwide, it made roughly as much as both Superman II and For Your Eyes Only combined—$354M. In today’s money, that’s $1.1B. Serious cheddar.
Next week we’re back with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Hey, don’t make Indy the only movie you see this weekend. Tomorrow, September 3rd, is National Cinema Day. Tickets at almost all theaters are $3. Get out and support a local theater!
NOTES
Almost Indys: Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Jack Nicholson, Jeff Bridges, and Tom Selleck.
The mid-air ghost released from the Ark was a Lucasfilm receptionist stuffed into a robe and dangled in front of a blue screen.
Belloq’s exploding head nabbed Raiders an R rating at first. They put flames over it to get the rating down. Other techniques include deflatable balloons to achieve a collapsing head and layers of gelatin over a stone skull sculpture torched to appear like layers of melting flesh. Analog effects are so gross and cool.
Indy’s outfit is based on Humphrey Bogart’s in Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Charlton Heston’s in Secret of the Incas.
Spielberg tasked cinematographer Douglas Slocombe with using natural light whenever possible. They used predictions of the sun’s position to plan scene layouts.
The Numbers calls it the leggiest movie of all time, measuring some statistic I can’t quite get my brain around.
The sound of the Ark being opened was made with a toilet lid. Once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.
As The Big Bang Theory pointed out, Indy is ultimately irrelevant to the plot. If anything, he prevents the Ark from killing Hitler.