Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
When George Lucas first pitched the idea of a old-fashioned
action adventure to Steven Spielberg, he couldn't possibly have
predicted that in resurrecting such Saturday morning B-movie fare
Spielberg would be setting the standard for summer blockbuster
movies for the next couple of decades.
Only the Midas touch of Spielberg and Lucas could create a
contemporary adventure story in which the main protagonist is an
archaeologist . . .
With Indiana Jones battling a thousand German soldiers for a
magic box full of sand, Harrison Ford took the leading man
charisma he'd been honing in Star Wars and created a
modern-day hero that would inspire Bruce Willis years later in Die
Hard.
As Dr Henry Indiana Jones Jnr, he was afraid of snakes, prone
to the charms of loose women and apt to lose to the bad guys at
seemingly crucial parts of the plot - and that's why we loved
him.
In The Temple Of Doom, Spielberg brought the franchise
to a darker place and was panned at the time by the critics. But
both Temple and The Last Crusade are light years
better than most of the movies that try to ape the success of this
trilogy.
From South American jungles to Nazi excavations in Egypt, it
didn't really matter that we were watching location sequences in a
South America that was really Hawaii, or an Egyptian desert that
was really Tunisia. We applauded the good guys, hissed the bad
guys, and hid our eyes when the horrors got too real - if you
suffer from herpetophobia or ophidiophobia, do NOT watch this
movie! There is a pit full of a slithering mass of live cobras,
asps, pythons, and boa constrictors.
The imaginative horrors Spielberg dreamed up included cracking
whips, poison arrows, bat-filled caves, plagues of tarantulas,
booby traps with stone doors equipped with steel teeth that clash
shut impaling their victims, catacombs containing hundreds of
human skeletons, red-hot pokers, exploding submarines, fires, lost
cities, mine shafts, and every kind of weapon ever conceived by
the kinds of minds that create comic books.
There's even a monkey that gives a "Heil Hitler"
before dying from poisoned dates and a Nazi Neanderthal who gets
splattered to kingdom come by spinning airplane propellers.
A replica South American temple was built at Elstree Studios,
London, complete with booby traps and 50 live tarantulas. The fake
boulder was made from a mixture of plaster, wood and fibreglass.
It was 12 feet high and weighed over 300 pounds - easily enough to
damage anyone falling in front of it.
Hell-bent on realism, Harrison Ford insisted on outrunning the
dangerous contraption himself. The scene had to be filmed from
several different angles and Ford managed to stay ahead of the
boulder all 10 times.
What read in the original script as a three-page whip vs sword
fight was transformed into sheer genius on the screen thanks to a
stomach bug which meant Harrison Ford could not complete the
planned sequence. Faced with an Arab swordsman (stuntman Terry
Richards), Indy calmly dispatches him with a single shot from his
revolver - Characterising the "let's go" spirit that
courses through the entire film. Who could have known that
archaeology could be this exciting?
Oh, by the way, Indiana is named after George Lucas' dog.
TRIVIA NOTES
For the eagle-eyed viewer, the hieroglyphics in the Well of Souls
include engravings of R2-D2 and C-3PO.
Since Egypt was under British rule in 1936 it is highly
unlikely that Nazi Germany would have been allowed to mount a
major archaeological expedition in the country. It is also far
more likely that the British would have discovered and excavated
the ark, and then taken it back to Blighty "for safe
keeping" like the Elgin Marbles. But hey . . . it's just a
movie.
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