35 Years Later: It's Not The Years, Honey; It's The Mileage

Rating: 10/10 (27 July 2016)

Where to begin? Writing this review, it has now been thirty-five years since this crazy Steven Spielberg/George Lucas homage to B-movie adventure serials of the 1930s was unleashed on an unsuspecting world in the late spring/early summer of 1981; and even with the three sequels that it has spawned (thus far) and the myriad imitations it has spawned, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK still has to rank as one of the high points of the action film genre's entire history. There's no question that there are elements of the film that are very dated nowadays, not to mention ethnic stereotypes that were wrong then and are even more wrong today. But for sheer artistic and cinematic verve, this still ranks as a Hollywood popcorn extravaganza par excellence.
There's no need any longer to go into plot, as we all know it involves Harrison Ford as the intrepid archaeologist Indiana Jones battling the Nazis in a race to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant and the unspeakable power locked inside it. But it is instructive to remember how big a deal this film was to all involved. Lucas had already struck a colossal gold mine with the first two STAR WARS films that had Ford as Han Solo; and Spielberg could boast having made two huge hits of his own in JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. Spielberg, however, had also gone well over schedule and budget on both of those two; and he did it again on his 1979 World War II comedy "1941", so much so that that film's poor critical and commercial finish almost finished him as a director. It was important for him that he deliver a film that could stick to both schedule and budget, yet still be good enough to be a hit. Fortunately, Lucas gave him that chance here; and with careful execution, all of the intended goals were achieved, and then some.
The two big action sequences, Ford's outrunning a rolling boulder in the famous opening prologue, and the truck chase across the Sinai Desert (eight minutes of hair-raising tension created in no small part by Ford doing his own stunt work) still must rank as some of the best of their kind ever pulled off. It also helps that Ford shows the kind of honest human vulnerability you don't find in most other action heroes (Stallone; Schwarzenneger, etc.); as he tells his girlfriend (Karen Allen): "It's not the years, honey; it's the mileage", which is more than a little true. There are moments where the violence, tame though it is by 21st century standards, did make some audiences back in 1981 a little squeamish (the face-melting that takes place in the opening of the Ark at the film's climax is still a tad bit sick); one must remember that this was rated 'PG', and the controversy surrounding the violence here and in its immediate sequel INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM led to the creation of the 'PG-13' rating. But there is also a certain amount of comedy relief as well, involving Ford's squeamish behavior around all forms of snakes, and the famous split-second shooting of an Arab swordsman, improvised downward from a big sword fight because Ford had eaten some bad local food on the day the scene was shot. The Nazi villains are, of course, cardboard villains (since the film was set in 1936, before anyone knew what Hitler and his minions were really up to, it was easier to do it that way); but Ford's nemesis Belloq (Paul Freeman) and the devious Toht (Ronald Lacey) are a couple of really nefarious heavies that give Ford's Indiana Jones something to chew on. And it wouldn't be right not to acknowledge Allen's slightly sardonic contribution to the film as well, especially when she knocks one knife-wielding goon cold with a skillet in the basket chase scene, an hysterically funny moment.
And finally, no review of this film would be complete without giving a nod to John Williams, whose score here, like many of his other contributions to the art of film scoring, gives the film its voice, from the famous Raiders March to the brass-choired Nazi theme during the truck chase. The end result is a masterpiece of the entire action genre that holds up even to this day, both real in other ways and fanciful in others, but with a balance that most of today's $200 million-plus sound-and-fury "blockbusters" may never be able to match.