"Passing through history"

Rating: 9/10 (22 February 2011)

Copying isn't always a bad thing. Copying is what 80s cinema did in a big way – from remakes and spoofs to homage and reference, cinema thrived on recycling the past. Raiders of the Lost Ark borrows the adventuresome plots and exciting action of 1930s serials, classic swashbucklers and the James Bond franchise, while hinting at influences as disparate as Lawrence of Arabia and the Cecil B. DeMille religious extravaganzas. And like all of the great blockbusters of this era, its success comes not only from its derivative nature or its non-stop action, but from the fact that it is simply brilliantly conceived.
Raiders of the Lost Ark also works by being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, pre-empting any sneers at the genre's clichés by spoofing them itself. The screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan features such self-satirizing lines as "You can't do this to me, I'm an American!" But this isn't quite like the brilliantly daft 1980 Flash Gordon, for which your sense of irony must be switched to max. Kasdan's script is fully-functioning and wholly professional. Every moment and every line counts. Exposition scenes often dovetail into action ones, so we never have a chance to get bored. The scene where the army intelligence people come to ask Indy about Ravenwood and the staff of Ra serves two purposes. Firstly, it gives the audience the necessary background for the quest ahead without being too presentational. Secondly, the officials' lack of knowledge and sympathy endears us further to Indy, and lets us know that we won't be calling in the cops or the army for this one.
Director Steven Spielberg has elaborated on Kasdan's work by fashioning action scenes that are both fun and inventive. Spielberg injects sequences with so many neat little ideas to continually amuse us and stop this from being a no-brainer. Take for example the local man falling onto the front of the truck during the road scene. Spielberg makes the moment both funny and exhilarating by showing us for a split-second the man's surprised face in the windshield. By-and-large the director keeps a rather detached eye, his camera often peeping through a bit of scenery or overlooking the action with a god-shot. It is this approach that gives so much of the picture its distinct, memorable look. Intense moments like Sallah's realisation that the dates are poisoned are composed of a series of attention-grabbing shots with no camera movement, creating a series of iconic images like the frames of a comic book. And this is really what Spielberg is at this stage of his career; a comic book director. But he happens to be a very good one.
What really makes Raiders of the Lost Ark such a treasure is its fabulous characters and the way they are presented. The hero Indiana Jones is introduced as an enigma, a mysterious figure in hat. The opening shots reveal him to be a leader at the head of a band, an expert in the field and eventually, a handy man with a whip – and only then do we see his face. Karen Allen's Marion is easily the best of the Indiana Jones heroines, tough and resourceful in her own right, able to be his partner in adventure. And Paul Freeman's Belloq is the ultimate Indiana Jones villain. Smart and sophisticated, his enmity fuelled by rivalry rather than a simple conflict of interests, he's probably the most believable foe Indy has ever come up against. At the other end of the scale there's the sinister thug Toht, played with relish by English TV actor Ronald Lacey. Lacey makes his entrance as the campy and comical Gestapo stereotype, but when he coldly whispers "Let me show you what I am used to" his tone is utterly menacing and the character becomes genuinely scary. There are so many more perfectly written and played supporting roles – John Rhys-Davies as Sallah, Denholm Elliott as Brody – and it's not clear whether the actors were cast to suit the characters or whether the characters were developed around the actors. Most likely a mix of both.
Raiders of the Lost Arc is really what all these early blockbusters were – a distillation of all the techniques for making high-quality entertainment. Yes, its ideas are cobbled together from the last five decades of action cinema, not to mention adventure literature and comic books, but it gets away with it. It gets away with it not just because of its knowing and light-hearted take approach, but because of how its makers have learned from the past, completely refining every aspect of the genre to make a modern classic.