Raiders will always retain its place as the franchise kick off, the template and standard setter for not only its gazillion grossing sequels but countless (often inferior) imitators.
But what works best for me in Raiders isn't the movie as a whole but individual scenes and images:
- The opener which is a self contained masterpiece of everything you expect in an action adventure epic- the search for an elusive treasure deep in dangerous and exotic territory, blow dart wielding natives, rival explorers, duplicitous aids and booby trapped mazes.
- Indy's perfunctory dispatch of a sword wielding assailant
- Mischievious monkey and poisoned dates ('Nuff said!)
- The sinister Mr. Thoth
- The opening of the ark, in spite of some obviously dated effects, still packs a whallop, with melting faces and flesh not to mention bodies drilled with light.
Perhaps it was because my intro to Indy came via The Temple Of Doom rather than Raiders, but it remains my favourite of the three. A breakneck pace that hardly pauses to take breath, Indy 2 opens in a Shanghai Nightclub, with a rousing musical number rendered by nightclub singer Willie Scott(Kate "Mrs. Spielberg" Capshaw ) (in Mandarin no less), while Indy negotiates with shifty looking Chinese Gangsters. One Switch and (poisonous) double-cross later, the action kicks off in high gear as a fight erupts amidst machine guns, gigantic gongs and loads of balloons which climaxes with Indy and Willie leaping out a window, crashing through canopies and landing in the getaway vehicle comandeered by Indy's Asian Boy sidekick Short Round. I use the word climax loosely as, like every other action scene in this breathless installment, the end of one deliriously executed set piece is merely the set up to another.
The nightclub fracas gives way to a car chase that ends with an airborne getaway, which turn out to be anything but as the aircraft is soon without it's shifty pilots who parachute off it, leaving the trio to exit said aircraft on an inflatable canoe, careening down a snowy mountain before careening off it down a waterfall and onto a river, finding themselves in India (Sri Lanka, actually )
There, Indy is put on a mission by a village elder to retrieve the lost Shankara stones, which have been stolen by a vicious Thuggee Cult that still specialise in Human Sacrifices.
If you want to get pissy about such things, there's plenty to get offended by Temple Of Doom. Short Round's pidgin English quickly becomes the movies least contentious exercise in racial stereotyping as you quickly get a grand tour of Exotic India, replete with jewelled and turbaned Maharajahs, whose palace subjects' enjoy feasting on sumptious courses of Chilled Monkey Brains, Pythons stuffed with live, wriggly eels, assorted bugs and eyeball soup, Kali Worshipping blood cults, epitomised by bald and baritone voiced Amrish Puri, spouting gibberish incantations as he rips the still beating heart out of a hapless sacrificial victim.
Or..you could just take it for the harmless fun it all is, although this is the darkest of the Indy movies, and more than the other 2, exudes a real sense of menace in certain scenes that do a better job of convincing you that our intrepid hero is in genuine danger, notably in a scene where he's force fed blood and falls under a spell. In fact, that's probably the only action lull in the movie as Indy goes rogue and almost kills Willie before recovering his senses and donning back The Hat and Whip. And the ride then commences...
For a movie that could justly be described as a rollercoaster ride, it's apt that it's climactic mine car chase is truly that, still a stunner even after decades of advancements in special effects and CGI.
Evil vanquished, Baddies Dipatched to become crocodile fodder,Shankara Stones Found, and Hero and Heroine share a final kiss. Action movies don't, and shouldn't, come much better than this.
And honestly, it didn't as revisiting the third installment, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, I was struck by the fact that it's action scenes , by now seem, by the numbers, with Spielberg and Lucas regurgitating the original's plot point of a religious artifact sought after by the Nazis (Ark in Raiders, Holy Grail here). Hell, it even apes Raiders in its University scenes of Marcus walking into Indy's class filled with adoring female students!There are, however, 3 nice touches, one interesting, one delightful and one bordering on brilliance.
Interesting would be Alison Doody as Elsa Schneider, the Indy heroine who strictly speaking, is anything but. Shifty and manipulative, Elsa beds Indy, then double crosses him and is finally undone by greed. There is some attempt to tone down her Nazi sympathies, but ice blonde Elsa is the closest thing in this serial adventure to approximate a Femme Fatale, which is no bad thing.
Delightful would be prologuing the film with Indy as a young boy (it's a little poignant to see the late River Phoenix as Young Indy), tracing his first encounter with a whip that yield the famous Harrison Ford chin scar, neatly explaining his later dislike of snakes and topping off with him being gifted The Hat. Short, brilliantly executed and concluded, this part in The Last Crusade is the best in the series' that consistently seem to pour most of its imagination and exuberance into it's Prologues. It's leanness merely accentuates the bloat in the rest its running time.
But all that pales alongside the film's Casting and Conceptual Coup, the Touch Of Brilliance: The casting of Sean Connery as Indy's crusty, academic but no less driven father. As the forerunner and very much patterned on James Bond, who better to play Indiana Jones Sr. then the first (and in many quarters acknowledegd to be the best) actor to play the agent with the Licence To Kill. Connery's chemistry with Ford is dynamite with the latter marvellously potraying Indy's by turns irritation, affection and in one sublime scene, genuine respect for the Father who never had time for him.
The Last Crusade scores on the Connery/Ford dynamics even while it flatlines with some of the dullest and least charismatic villains to grace the Indy franchise. Julian Glover's billionaire philanthropist and a Nazi general so generic I've forgotten his name is a pale shadow of the creepy and reptilian Thoth in Raiders and the flamboyantly over the top Mola Ram of The Temple Of Doom.
It's been more than 25 years and I await the the latest Tilt Of The Fedora and the Crack Of The Whip with glee.
As Elsa would say "Giddy as a schoolboy!"
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