Following an opening couple of minutes that, via the clashing fonts that appear over tropical wilds, promise a knowing synthesis of old-fashioned adventure and modern filmmaking technologies, we're introduced to a hero who literally moves from darkness to light, then back again. In
Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Indiana Jones character is consistently defined through contrast and conflict. Steven Spielberg's film containing a series of checks and balances that allow Harrison Ford's weather-beaten daredevil to push at a tougher, more morally complicated portrayal simply by quickly countering any question of perceived devilment with a less obliquely brutal answer. Agents, pursuing similar dramatic ends, are habitually deployed to instantly correct any lingering doubts the audience may have about Jones. Indy is always made the hero by these (often immediate) comparisons. Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, working from a brief provided by George Lucas and Phillip Kaufman, structures key moments around opposing forces and ideologies that, naturally, track together towards violent antipathy.
A straightforward example of this method of characterisation comes early in the film when describing Jones' reunion with Karen Allen's Marion, a former flame that the rough and tumble archaeologist left heartbroken. Operating without the benefit of a source material or an extant franchise behind it, Raiders has to be rather blunt in how it establishes its hero. Jones has to be dangerous and desirable but, unlike say Sean Connery's James Bond, not quite a full-on cad. Considering that the couple are quickly at each other's throats - as if resuming an argument that hadn't ever reached an adequate conclusion - there is clearly bitterness between Marion and Jones. Ms Ravenwood holds the adventurer responsible for her diminished station, accusing him of taking advantage of her youth and, very likely, driving a wedge between her and her father - Indiana's mentor, the late Abner Ravenwood. Jones barely argues back, defaulting to insincere apologies and an all-too hurried talk about remuneration.
In these moments Jones directly acknowledges a sincere debt to Marion, one that he believes runs to thousands of dollars - life-changing amounts of money in the 1930s. Marion's use of the word 'child' sticks as well, especially since we've not long seen Jones as a university lecturer not exactly courting, but certainly enjoying, the attention of a classroom full of besotted students. It's crucial here that Jones' reaction is steeped in bemusement. An earlier and rather damning aside that had Jones packing off one particularly beautiful undergrad to his office, asking her to wait for him while he takes a meeting with Army Intelligence, was wisely jettisoned from the final edit of the film. In Raiders as released, Jones is consumed by his work to such a degree that the unresolved relationship with Marion is allowed to take on a larger significance both within the film and in Indiana Jones' life.
Far from a reconciliation, Jones and Marion's meeting is rough, instantly arriving at a fraught emotional pitch. Jones' clumsy talk of money is judged offensive when weighed against the sacrifices and disappointments that have defined Marion's life. The couple quarrel, lie to each other, then break - Jones apparently departing - before more guests arrive. Ronald Lacey's Gestapo spy Toht and a gang of assorted heavies saunter in from the cold, all loaded down with pistols and sub-machine guns. This intrusion provides an instant example of disparity. While Jones' offer may have been inelegant or emotionally inert, Toht's is instantly homicidal, quickly dispensing with aimless pleasantries to knuckle down to Marion's imminent torture. Thankfully, Jones intervenes and a shoot-out ensues - Spielberg and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe using long set-ups filed with crisscrossing action to emphasise just how close these warring parties are to each other. Eventually, Jones and Marion work together to rout the Nazis and hired thugs that have invaded Ravenwood's smouldering bar, cementing an uneasy alliance.
It's not just Toht who is offered up as a misshapen reflection of Jones either. Raiders is filled with people that allow the filmmakers to drive at an idea of comparison when considering their own hero, Paul Freeman's rival graverobber Belloq being the most obvious example. Older, similarly charming, but damned by his willingness to work with the Nazis, Belloq uses the knowledge he has acquired to exert dominion over those suffering from an inferior preparation. This manipulative Frenchman is first met in the Peruvian jungle, his smoky entrance packed with visual allusions to (then recent) works that deal with unscrupulous and unchecked colonial intent - from the spears that hurtle straight into the camera, as in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, to the notion that a white invader can leverage his willingness to lie to an indigenous people and incite them to advantageous violence (as in Heart of Darkness, the Joseph Conrad novella that inspired Coppola's bad acid trip). Belloq is drunk - quite literally at one point - on his own power, an egotistical self-assurance that powers his eventual undoing.
These call-and-response contrasts are just one arrow in Raiders of The Lost Ark's quiver though, a subliminal pulse that provides clues and context around a never-ending succession of bravura action sequences. The film's latter half is truly breathless. Scenes and situations bleed into each other; on-screen excitement behaving like a series of musical movements rather than strict, or even logical, incident. The strongest of these passages begins with Marion and Jones trapped in the snake-filled crypt that used to house The Ark of the Covenant. Indy manages to topple an enormous statue of Anubis, opening up an improvised exit out of this writhing mausoleum. Marion ventures forth first, stumbling into a chamber filled with desiccated horrors straight out of a Lucio Fulci film. Shrunken and shrivelled bodies wheeze then collapse out of their cluttered coffins, crowding and clawing at our shrieking heroine.
Eventually Jones takes her hand, dragging her out of this nightmare. They topple an enormous sandstone block and find themselves on an impromptu airfield. The transition is clearly absurd - the Nazis have never thought to have even a brief nose around the crumbling catacomb that overlooks where they have settled their experimental aircraft? - but the passage from one problem to another is carried by how this new puzzle is presented and arranged: an undulating groan from the twin engines of a flying wing, an anachronistically futuristic craft surrounded by sand-caked staff who hurry back and forth. We hear the obstacle, and the danger it implies, long before Indy has had a chance to scurry all over it. A panting lunge directly into another fight might've lurched, instead Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn allow assessment to assert itself in these scenes. Jones and Marion sneak away from a sunken tomb towards a collection of barrels housed in a quiet corner of the airstrip. They discuss the imminent flight of the Ark away from this place before the film cuts to gloating Nazis, drinking and sunning themselves while their destinies are about to be cemented by gee-whiz machinery.
The resulting mayhem is a series of mounting and intersecting calamities, with characters repeatedly thwarted and frustrated when attempting to deal with larger, impending perils. The inexpert-but-enthusiastic Marion and an increasingly swollen Indy slowly pick away at Afrika Korp arrogance until the attendant heavies are either whisked up the side of the prototype plane or riddled with bullets, all while flames lick at petrol dumps. The inevitable detonation is a physical effect, captured on the day from a telescopic perspective that tracks a white shockwave as it carries along the desert floor and underneath our fleeing heroes' feet, making every grain of sand stand on end. After a couple of brief asides, one of which invokes the Jones name as a spectre of calamity, we're being ushered towards the next spectacle. John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra launch into Desert Chase, a seven minute musical cue that batters back-and-forth between two voices: a galloping heroism ascribed to Indiana Jones and his horse and the mechanically regimented bark of a trundling German truck convoy.
The sequence that follows provides a bridge between the seminal rodeo stunt work seen in John Ford's
Stagecoach and
The Road Warrior's (released six months after Raiders) description of a Neolithic biker gang hunting down a leaking Mack truck: Indy (Harrison Ford, as doubled by stunt men Terry Leonard, Charles Waters and Vic Armstrong) dismounts his horse, at speed, to scramble around the canvas cover of a mocked-up Mercedes, fighting off all-comers. Raiders hinges on the idea of a Godly historical artefact not only being real but actually physically obtainable in this present of 1936. It is a link to humanity's distant past - when we conversed with a higher power - that promises to confer unimaginable boons on its possessor. And so an idea of ownership drives this desert chase; the Ark as a touchable object that is traded back-and-forth between two warring parties. The crux of Raiders then - denying Hitler his prize - is expressed literally through action with Jones violently commandeering the vehicle housing the sacred testimony of the Israelites. As with the airfield fight, the sense of danger is not simply derived from one source.
As well as the other Nazi trucks, cars and their mounted machine-guns, Indy must avoid collapsing building sites while driving along dirt roads that overlook bottomless chasms. He's not just hauling the Ark either, his truck also contains a squad of grizzled infantrymen, equally able to navigate the flapping carapace of a swerving semi. Jones isn't safe in the truck's cab. Although he is able to shake off several of his creeping foes, one assassin slips through the crashing palm leaves to blast a hole through Indy's arm. The injury is accompanied by fizzing blast of blood, the sort of visceral punctuation completely lacking in the rubbery conflict of modern blockbusters. Jones is now wounded and noticeably weakened, just in time for the most sensible, and therefore most dangerous, DAK trooper to make his way towards the head of the vehicle. Stunt man Sergio Mioni plays the tough who comes sailing in through the driver's window, crashing into Indy before quickly recognising that his opponent is wincing and clutching at his oozing arm. The soldier hammers on the bleeding limb - staining his knuckles red - then hurls Jones out of the windshield head-first, narrowly avoiding the camera.
Indy's path back to the driver's seat is a sublime series of stunts built around the idea that Jones cannot catch a break. The hood ornament bends then breaks when Indy attempts to hold on; the grill snaps and crumbles when his panicked hands grasp at it. The truck speeds up, intending to crush Indiana Jones against the backside of a lead automobile carrying the archaeologist's most senior enemies. A mixture of quick-thinking and suicidal bravery takes Jones underneath the vehicle, his body pained and rigid as it bounces along not so much a road but a track that has been impressed upon jumping, gravelly debris. Back on the topside of the truck Jones races back to the front, making short work of this motor vehicle climbing frame. Indy enters the same way as the tough who dethroned him: by kicking the usurper in his face. Jones batters the soldier's head against all available surfaces, then sends him out through what remains of the shattered windshield. Mioni's panicked invader is much less successful than his American enemy, quickly ending up as a smear on the truck's tires. Relentless but never exhausting, Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark dances confidently from set-piece to set-piece, finding new ways to trap and exasperate its disheveled subject. Victories are won through luck and a teeth-baring resilience - rather than the all-conquering might of syringe pricked musculature - by a hero who is the human embodiment of a bad penny. Easily in the conversation for the greatest of all American action films.
