Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Film Review

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Director: Steven Spielberg

“You and I are very much alike. Archeology is our religion, yet we have both fallen from the pure faith. Our methods have not differed as much as you pretend. I am but a shadowy reflection of you. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. To push you out of the light.”

★★★★★

The story of Indiana Jones (originally named “Indiana Smith”) came to George Lucas in the early pre-production process for Star Wars. The idea was to create an action-adventure movie based on the old cliffhanger action serials of the 1930s and 1940s (the first name of “Indiana” was derived from George Lucas’s dog). However, the concept was put on hold as Lucas nearly ran himself into the ground creating the first Star Wars movie in 1977 –it was a stressful film production that he was sure would fail at the box office so he decided to skip the opening release of Star Wars and instead depart for a vacation in Hawaii. While in Hawaii with his friend Steven Spielberg, they discussed Spielberg’s desire to direct a James Bond film so Lucas offered his friend the next best thing: a rollicking adventure film involving an intrepid archaeologist, a pack of Nazi villains, and a search for the mythical Ark of the Covenant. “Indiana Smith” was James Bond without all the gadgets, and it was to be shot using old-fashioned camera tricks. Naturally, Spielberg jumped at the idea.

Since George Lucas was still working on the Star Wars trilogy, he became a producer on the Indiana Jones project instead. As would later happen in The Empire Strikes Back, he and Spielberg hired Lawrence Kasden to write the script for the film. And once they secured a deal with Michael Eisner, who was a producer at Paramount at the time, Lucas had once again negotiated an extraordinary financial windfall for himself. With all the pieces falling into place Spielberg and Lucas searched for an actor, settling at one point on Tom Selleck, before switching to the young upstart Harrison Ford (who was apparently somewhat reticent to sign a three-picture deal on the project). Raiders of the Lost Ark was shot using much of the same locales as featured in Star Wars (including unpleasant conditions in Tunisia wherein everyone on the set caught dysentery). Nevertheless, Spielberg had established for himself a simple, modest goal: create a fast-paced B-movie in the vein of old Hollywood serials as a hopeful effort to finally make a picture on time and under budget (Jaws which came out several years earlier, had achieved neither). For Raiders of the Lost Ark the whole film was meticulously shot and designed to be rife with allusions to Old Hollywood, and as such it was story-boarded in a remarkably detailed fashion, but despite all the planning efforts there were still many scenes that ended up with spontaneous improvisations and Harrison Ford was regularly injured on set (he was adamant that he would perform all his own stunts).

The film opens in South America in 1936 in an absolutely iconic scene of Indiana Jones, our fedora-wearing, gun and bull whip-wielding, gruff combination of classic actors like Charlton Heston, Humphrey Bogart, and Howard Hughes, as he ventures deep into a forbidden cave where “no one has come out alive” in order to retrieve a rare golden idol protected by various obstacles and rigged with antiquated booby traps (apparently, Indiana Jones’s competitor named “Forrestal” died in this very jungle trying to claim this object for himself). Indy’s Peruvian guide on this adventure, Satipo, ends up betraying him for being killed in the cave. Of course, this tense moment is followed by the famous giant rolling boulder scene as the cave begins to disintegrate –the summit of fun movie-making! Indiana Jones is quickly revealed not to be a super-hero, but rather a somewhat battered, vulnerable, survivalist who is highly intelligent. However, once free of the cave, Jones is confronted by his arch-rival archaeologist René Belloq (Paul Freeman) who steals his prized golden idol and leaves Jones to be chased by a group of natives –he only narrowly escapes by plane piloted by a man named Jock. Next, back in the United States, we see a poindexterous Indiana Jones, or “Indy,” wearing glasses and a professorial coat where he teaches at Marshall College in Bedford, CT. In an amusing scene, one of his female students looks up at him and blinks her eyelids which have the words written “love you” on them (as if to say “eye love you”). Here, Jones meets up with his old friend, Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) and they discuss what happened to the recent antiquity Jones lost, Jones’s plans to track it down in Marrakesh, and other items Brody agrees to purchase for “the museum” (strangely, while they speak, Brody takes an apple left by one of Jones’s students, shines it, and stuffs it into his pocket –what is this all about?) At any rate, Brody brings Jones to meet with a pair of military intelligence officers. Jones is asked about his mentor, Professor Abner Ravenwood, whom he studied under at the University of Chicago. Jones claims they had a falling out and haven’t spoken in about ten years. Presently, the Nazis are trying to acquire as many artifacts around the world as possible –Hitler is utterly obsessed with the occult! In an intercepted transmission, the Nazis state they hav discovered Tanis, one of the possible resting places of the lost Ark of the Covenant when an Egyptian Pharoah invaded Jerusalem and stole the ark, bringing it to Tanis to rest in the Well of the Souls. The Nazis are currently searching for the Staff of Ra but in order to do so they are hoping to track down Ravenwood to help locate the ark to harness its boundless power. Indiana Jones is then sent out to find the lost ark before the Nazis do –but before he leaves, Marcus Brody warns Jones about the dangers in tracking down an ancient artifact like the ark.

In searching for Abner Ravenwood, Jones travels to Nepal where he reunites with an old rough-and-tumble love interest named Marion Ravenwood (played by Karen Allen), daughter of Abner Ravenwood. The two of them have a delightful Cary Grant-Carole Lombard screwball comedy dynamic throughout the film. As the plot moves forward, we learn that Abner Ravenwood has died. there is a mysterious medallion (the head of the Staff of Ra) which is being hunted by the Nazis, a map-room, and a sadistic Nazi goon named Major Arnold Toht (Ronald Lacey) who burns his hand on the medallion at Marion Ravenwood’s bar. From here, dodging the Nazis, Jones and Ravenwood fly to Cairo where they meet up with Jones’s friend Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) the “best digger in Egypt” and they comically flee from the Nazis through the streets of Cairo a la Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Baghdad (1924). Finally, discover the Ark in a cave filled with snakes (“asps, very dangerous you go first”) only to be caught by a laughable cohort of frothing, erratic Nazis who are ultimately undone when the Ark is climactically exposed and those who look upon it are all horrifyingly liquified –it is the ultimate symbol of Jewish revenge on Nazi hatred. This notion of revenge is a key theme in the film. The Nazis represent a kind of modern transgression upon sacred customs (i.e. violating the curse of the ancient Ark of the Covenant). They almost always appear as a ragtag collection of foolhardy buffoons –or a pre-World War II maniacal, goose-stepping, bloodthirsty band of power-hungry goons. Similarly, archaeology is a chief theme in the film –to what extent are Indy and the Nazis doing the same thing? What makes Indy the hero and the Nazis the villains? Taking things and uprooting them out of the dust of history is perhaps not a value-neutral act. Whereas the Nazis are seeking a ghostly super-weapon in order to bring the past to life, Indiana Jones, on the other hand, seeks to simply preserve the past as it was. He is an antiquarian or a museum-lover who believes in education for its own sake, and in this way he represents the post-Hegelian idea of an end of history. However the supra-historical, as exemplified in the American system of bureaucratic cataloguing, is shown to be superior to the Nazi belief in the prophetic fulfillment of history.

In the end, we are treated to one final iconic scene in which Indy is calmly reassured that top bureaucrats are carefully inspecting the Ark, but in fact the film closes with a slowly retreating shot as a lone warehouse worker files away a wooden box containing the Ark of the Covenant inside a massive store-room filled with thousands of other identical boxes. At the close we are left to wonder, how many other mysteries are lying in wait either out in dangerous deserts and jungles, or simply filed away in sterile government warehouses? The film toys with various ghostly themes as the idea of relic-hunting can have its limits, even for a Western academic like Indiana Jones who was initially skeptical about the dangers posed by supernatural phenomenon, but by the end of the film we see him tightly shutting his eyes in order to save his own life from the dark spirits within the Ark. The irony of his character is that Indiana Jones hardly saves the day, far from it, he simply survives to tell the tale.

I should also mention that on top of Jaws, Star Wars, and Superman John Williams returns in Raiders of the Lost Ark with an absolutely perfect, instantly recognizable score for the film. In many ways it is the score that makes this film. Simply put Raiders of the Lost Ark is a wonderful, classically-inspired action-adventure –a rare gem for any generation of movie-goer.

Click here to return to my film reviews.

Click here to return to my reviews of the Indiana Jones series.

• Director: Steven Spielberg
• Screenplay by: Lawrence Kasdan
• Story by: George Lucas and Philip Kaufman
• Produced by: Frank Marshall
• Starring:
  • Harrison Ford…..Indiana Jones, an archaeology professor at Marshall College (Bedford, CT), expert in the occult, and obtainer of rare antiquities
  • Karen Allen…..Marion Ravenwood, a rough and tumble bar owner in Nepal and former lover of Indiana Jones whose late father Abner Ravenwood was an archaeologist focused on the Ark of the Covenant
  • Paul Freeman…..René Belloq, a rival archaeologist who is employed by the Nazis
  • Ronald Lacey…..Major Arnold Toht, a sadistic Gestapo agent
  • John Rhys-Davies…..Sallah, an Egyptian excavator and old friend of Indiana Jones
  • Denholm Elliott…..Marcus Brody, a museum curator and Jones’ loyal friend
• Cinematography by: Douglas Slocombe
• Edited by: Michael Kahn
• Music by: John Williams
• Production Company: Lucasfilm Ltd.
• Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
• Other Facts:
  • The Wilhelm Scream: first used in the 1951 film Distant Drums wherein a character named Sergeant Wilhelm is attacked by an alligator.
  • Raiders of the Lost Ark was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won five (Best Sounds, Best Art Direction, Best Film Editing, and Best Visual Effects).
  • Marion was named after the grandmother of Meg Kasdan, Larry Kasdan’s wife.
  • Indiana Jones was originally named “Indiana Smith” and so-named after George Lucas’s dog.
  • Almost all the cast and crew suffered from food poisoning when shooting the Cairo scenes in Tunisia, except for Spielberg who ate only canned food.
  • Pat Roach (a professional wrestler and martial artist) plays the large, lurking henchman who battles with Indiana Jones by the Flying Wing and is killed after being hacked apart by the plane propeller.
  • Steven Soderberg’s “Soderberg Cut” is a special edition of the film removes all sound, color, and musuc from the film while exclusively focusing on Spielberg’s visual style.
  • Part of the inspiration for the aesthetic of Indiana Jones came from Secret of the Incas (1954) starring Charlton Heston, as well as Gunga Din (1939) particular for The Temple of Doom, and a comic book entitled “Uncle Scrooge: The Seven Cities of Gold.”
  • The submarine featured in Das Boot (1981) was also re-used in Raiders of the Lost Ark.