Conception of a Series.

Rating: 7/10 (9 July 2011)

Original, exciting, and lots of fun. Spielberg directed it and Kasdan and Lucas wrote it. Without it, we wouldn't have had "Romancing the Stone", "The Jewel of the Nile," "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Empire", and many others too numerous to list. They were all more or less rip offs of this one. Of course the original was highly successful. I dragged my lugubrious ex to the theater and even SHE enjoyed it. For a while there was an attempt to merchandise Indiana Jones' leather jackets, fedoras, and bull whips but they didn't get far.
The fact that this was such a commercial blockbuster raised the inevitable question, which may be roughly phrased as, "What do I do NOW, Ma?" What you do is produce sequels: "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," "Indiana Jones and the Amazon Women of the Moon," and so on. Each imitation, each sequel, was less innovative and more desperate and sloppy, but that's in the nature of decadence.
Harrison Ford, whose career this put the stamp of approval on, is an archaeologist who is recruited to find the Ark of the Covenant hidden somewhere in the Middle East. It's 1936 and the Nazis are after it and who knows what havoc they might wreak with its powers? Jones drags along Karen Allen, a former lover and assistant, to provide a pulchritudinous sidekick with whom he can exchange insults. Anything resembling sex is out of the question, though, just as it would never have been considered in one of the 1930s Saturday afternoon theater serials on which this kind of story is based.
Here's the schematic diagram of the plot: Introduction, suspense, action, suspense, action, suspense . . . n. Then the climax -- a really BIG action scene.
But the thing that made it successful and keeps it so enjoyable after thirty years is that the action wasn't of the usual sort. Oh, sure, Jones and his girl friend are threatened with immanent death lots of times -- involved in comic fist fights, shot at with poisoned arrows. That's de rigeur. But how often does a hero find himself dashing through an underground tunnel downhill pursued by a three-ton rolling marble? Another element that contributed to its appeal was its reconstruction of the period, 1936. The exotic settings of 1936 aren't just rebuilt. They're lovingly reproduced. The ordinary set dressings are there to suggest the exotic -- always look for beaded curtains -- but the men don't waltz around in immaculate double-breasted white suits and pith helmets. The settings are overblown, to be sure. I strongly doubt that in all of Nepal there was a saloon with the size and atmosphere of Karen Allen's. I'm not at all sure there were ANY saloons in Nepal in 1936. But they're meant to suggest authenticity, not embody it, and they succeed in an creative way.
Finally, the characters are kind of enjoyable in themselves, from the often frightened and only barely willing Indiana Jones himself, through the cartoon Nazis with the monocles and Swastika armbands. Oh, boy, watch the ark of the covenant MELT them down to nothing while they are frozen in place and screaming! The force unleashed.