Kiss Me Deadly Around the World in 80 Days

Rating: 10/10 (28 October 2011)

This cultural legacy is still a movie of splendid imagination and swift pace that clutches you with its very first playful image, dashes you through a progression of remarkable escapades, and drops you back in reality two hours later with a juvenile smirk. This movie commemorates the stories we exhausted our youth plowing through in comics and movies, where the hero gets out of bed wondering what intrepid feats and shocking terror he'll be surviving in the next couple minutes. And indeed, it marks off the rainforests of South America, the surroundings of Tibet, the barrenness of Egypt, a clandestine submarine base, a remote island, an ancient cryptand an American archaeology classroom. Our hero tangles with vicious Nazis, slippery gravediggers, inebriated Sherpas and devious Frenchmen. It all culminates in the literal wrath of God, building to that dazzling meltdown with tarantulas, boulders, spears, falling rock, flaming airplanes, runaway trucks, preserved tombs and of course, snakes, all the while riding horse carts, biplanes, motorcycles, submarines, ships, trains and trucks.
Indy and Marion outlive a chain of ghastly snares, tricks, surprise attacks and doom worse than mortality of which Lucas, Gordon and Kaufman propose numerous, Karen Allen equaling Ford bit by bit through the film's romantic, comic and action-tilting requirements: A drinker and fighter, Marion is promptly established as no measly damsel in distress. And one chase features a truck, three jeeps, a horse, a motorcycle and a tremendously arduous stunt in which a character must achieve a 360-degree rotation of the racing truck. All is realized with the touch of a master entertainer at the helm, merging stunts, visual effects, painstaking technique and pure sweat. The crucial bounty sought by Jones, Belloq (Moriarty to Indy's Holmes), the U.S. government and the Nazis alike is the Ark of the Covenant.
Two elements make this defining film more than merely a triumph of spectacle: Its sense of humor and the quaint stylishness of its characters. This is time and again a hilarious film, the biggest laugh coming from the ancient and obvious gag involving a sword and a gun. And to the standard of the 1940s' Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon serials, the personalities of the crucial characters are extremely charming. In this first outing, Ford creates an aloof, modest, persistent character.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is like the dieselpunk successor to The 39 Steps, Saboteur and North By Northwest, relentlessly putting the action in adventure. Lucas' idea was to imbue with fresh energy an old dramatic style, with its thrill-seeking, sharply winding composition always building to exciting release. It takes us back to our youth. Virtually all summer movies today attempt that, but it's easy to become immersed in today's dime-a-dozen blockbuster dreck and forget the true profundity of difference between saying that about a mediocre film and about a Spielberg film, the Indiana Jones phenomenon in a very distinct way. Today's Armageddons, Snakes on a Planes, REDs, Fast and Furiouses, Wild Wild Wests, Sucker Punches, Die Hard 4's, and yes even Indiana Jones 4's try to achieve their errand by being childish instead of childlike. The original Indiana Jones trilogy, beginning here, is the quintessential template.
Ford brings every scrap of his terse appeal and physicality to his Indiana Jones, a reserved professor who releases his inner gallant in vigorous quest for fortune and glory in precious artifacts that belong in a museum. One of the moments that connect us to Indy is when he's slipping off of the side of a bottomless pit, having hardly caught hold of a root protruding from the earth. Spielberg cuts to a close-up of Indy, smiling in respite, but when we go back to wide, the root yanks out of the earth and he's about to fall into the void. That close-up unites us with Indy, that momentary "Whew!" amidst all the chaos.
Spielberg gives dutifully focused meticulousness to clever and resourceful action sequences, scored with exactness by John Williams. The stunts, photography and editing so conscientiously applied to the myriad chases and scuffles are the gauge for action-adventure films since in their lucidity and vigor. The quest is the whole, with Jones showing his nerve, but ultimately meeting consuming powers with wonder and humility. The religious tinges and sweeps against mortality are crafty pickings on the part of Spielberg and Lucas. They know moviegoers want to lose control and get excited, to devote themselves to a story not just to defer disbelief, but to believe. Reality can hold its horses for now.
Raiders endures for numerous reasons, not least of which is due to Spielberg's supreme dexterity as a visual storyteller and his knack for finding electric performances in his actors that nevertheless slip right into the whole cacophony. His style is masterful, and yet invisible. Every individual set piece is breathtaking in its tempo, joke delivery and emotional upshot. The scene in Marion's Nepalese bar begins with a beefy drinking game. This is promptly trailed by some romantic friction as Indy returns to her life and they parley over a supposedly missing relic she might still possess. Eventually, Nazis arrive led by a dark, goggled, panting sadist. The action that ensues has everybody giving the mortal skirmish their all, but it's all the punctuating details that make it unforgettable, bullets puncturing a barrel of whiskey and Marion leaning over to guzzle some before it spills, Indy wrestling with a brute whose arm is aflame, and the Nazi ringleader ordering his machine gun-wielding henchman to just shoot them both. Unlike most present-day action films, Spielberg crafts dynamic pictures with diverse on screen action.