Raiders of the Lost Ark: Difference between revisions

Raiders of the Lost Ark
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Directed by	Steven Spielberg
Written by	George Lucas, Philip Kaufman, Lawrence Kasdan
Produced by	Howard Kazanjian, George Lucas, Frank Marshall
Starring	Harrison Ford Karen Allen
Music by	John Williams
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Running time	115 min.
Budget	$20,000,000

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a feature film released by Paramount Pictures in 1981. Directed by Steven Spielberg, it is a fantasy adventure and the first in a series of film and TV productions about the adventures of the heroic fictional archaeologist Indiana Jones, who was played by actor Harrison Ford. Indy is a professor of archaeology and also acquires artifacts for Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott), who works for a museum. On his adventure he is accompanied by Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) and Sallah (John Rhys-Davies). His bête noire is Rene Belloq (Paul Freeman).

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler Set in 1936, the story begins with Indy's journey into the South American jungle with a few local guides to find a hidden temple that houses a golden idol head. Jones avoids various traps, the betrayal of both his guides, and, in one memorable and much-parrodied scene, a giant rolling boulder that chases him out of the temple. Waiting for him outside is his nemesis, French archeologist Rene Belloq, and a small army of Hovidos natives. Belloq steals the idol from Jones, who barely escapes in his nearby pontoon plane.

Back at the American university where he teaches, two US Army intelligence men summon Jones into the auditorium along with Marcus, head of the department and a good friend of Indy. The men explain that the US has intercepted a cryptic Nazi message that mentions a Prof. Ravenwood being under the scrutiny of German intelligence. Indy, a former student of Ravenwood, helps interpret the message as an indication that the Nazis are close to finding the Ark of the Covenant — a golden and jeweled chest constructed under the guidance of God and Moses that housed the remnants of the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Legends imply that Hitler could use the Ark to render his rising army invincible.

The Germans believe that Ravenwood has the headpiece of the Staff of Ra needed to pinpoint the Ark's resting place. The headpiece is a golden disk that, when affixed to the top of a staff of a specific height, focuses a beam of sun light on a model of Tanis (an ancient Egyptian city) and thus reveals the Ark's location. According to Ravenwood, the Pharaoh Shishaq stole the Ark from Jerusalem but then buried it in the desert sands of his capital city, Tanis, in teh Well of Souls

Indy flies to snowy, mountainous Nepal to speak with Marion Ravenwood, the professor's tough-minded and independent daughter, only to find that her father died and that she's reluctant to part with the headpiece. A Nazi agent named Toht who had followed Indy to Marion tries to take the piece from her by threatening her with a hot iron. Marion teams up with Indy following a shootout between him and Toht's hired thugs in Marion's tavern. The pair drive off the assailants, although Toht inadvertantly brands the markings of on one side of the headpiece on his palm when he tries to grab it when it is red hot. Jones and Ravenwood fly to Cairo and meet Indy's friend Sallah, a skilled Egyptian digger and archaeologist, to find help in decoding the markings in the headpiece that specify the height of the staff needed to hold the headpiece.

While touring about Cairo's markets, Marion and Indy are chased by hired swordsmen. Nazi operatives grab Marion and throw her in a truck, but the vehicle crashes and explodes when Indy dispatches the driver with his pistol. Fearing that Marion was most likely killed in the blast, Indy in a rage encounters Belloq once more in a Cairo tavern and wishes to kill him despite Belloq's sermon about the Ark's wonders. Sallah and his children rescue Indy from Belloq's bodyguards.

That evening, Sallah takes Indy to an old wiseman who decodes the markings. He notes that one side of the piece said says that the staff must be shortened out of respect for the Hebrew. It appears that the Nazis have misread the headpiece (since they only have a copy of one side's markings). Their staff is too long, and they are thus digging for the Ark in the wrong place.

Infiltrating the dig, Indy and Sallah use the headpiece in the map room to then find the Ark deep within the snake-infested Well of Souls. Belloq and the Germans, led by the sadistic Col. Dietrich and his assistant Gobler, surround the entrance, take the Ark, and leave Indy and Marion to die in the snake-infested pit. They escape though a weak stone wall and arrive in time to see a Luftwaffe plane being prepared to ship the Ark to Berlin.

After attempting to stop the pilot, Indy gets entangled in a fight with a big muscular soldier (Pat Roach) around the spinning propellers of the plane. Marion knocks out the pilot and fends off some infantrymen with the plane's coaxial machine gun while Indy (beat to the ground) hides his face when his opponent is torn apart off-camera by a propeller. Gas ignites the plane, and Belloq and Dietrich put the Ark on a truck instead.

Stealing a horse and charging off at the truck convoy, Indy manages to take the wheel of the truck, throw the passengers off the back, fend off the other support vehicles, and escape, all in a rather dramatic chase scene. Retaking the Ark, Indy and Marion depart from a happy Sallah and sail with it on the Bantu Wind a ship bound for England.

A Nazi U-boat with Belloq and Dietrich stops the ship and takes the Ark and Marion, but Indy covertly follows the sub (having already stowed on board). It docks at a submarine pen on an island in the Aegean Sea, where Indy steals a soldier's uniform. Threatening to destroy the Ark with a rocket launcher, Indy is soon convinced by Belloq to surrender, giving in to his own deep desires as an archaeologist to see the Ark's contents.

Marion and Indy are tied up and forced to view a ceremony where Belloq opens the Ark in front of a group of German soldiers. Strange and mysterious spirits emerge, killing Belloq (whose head explodes), Dietrich (who dries up like a raisin), Toht (who literally melts), the soldiers, and evaporating their souls into the afterlife. Indy and Marion are spared because Jones realizes that the spirits must not be viewed and shuts his eyes and instructs Marion likewise. The couple thus escaped the wrath of the Ark.

Later, back in Washington D.C., the two Army intelligence representatives tell Indy that "top men" are studying the Ark, but in dramatic irony the Ark is sealed in a wooden crate and stored in a giant government warehouse filled with countless other similar crates.

Production

George Lucas originally became involved in the project in 1977. Like Star Wars he saw it as an opportunity to create a modern version of the serials of the 1930s and 1940s. The early 1970s had been dominated by action films either with a certain gritty realism, such as the Dirty Harry series or that were massive productions with huge casts and elaborate special effects such as The Poseidon Adventure. By contrast Raiders of the Lost Ark is comic book-like in tone, with a glamorous heroine, over-the-top villains, and impressive stunt work combined with moments of comedy. It was also limited in its ambitions as it was shot in only 73 days, the plot is rather straightforward, and there are only a few principal characters.

Lucas had conceived of the idea in discussion with Philip Kaufman who had worked on a treatment. In a "Making of..." TV special, Lucas said that the mental picture of Indy chasing the truck on horseback, in the style of a western hero chasing a runaway stagecoach, was his initial inspiration for the film. He told his colleague, "I want to see this movie!" While on holiday in Hawaii with his close friend Steven Spielberg, the pair worked out the basis for the film. At the time Spielberg's career was suffering due to the expensive bomb 1941 so it was agreed that Lucas would produce and Spielberg would direct. A new screenplay was commissioned from Lawrence Kasdan. 'Raiders' was conceived by Paramount Pictures as a star vehicle for Tom Selleck but he was not available due to a commitment to star in the American television show Magnum, P.I., so Harrison Ford was cast instead.

It should also be noted that Steven Spielberg had expressed an interest in directing a James Bond film, but to no avail from EoN, the production company which owned the rights to the character. Lucas convinced his friend Spielberg that he had conceived a character "better than James Bond": Indiana Jones.

Reaction

The $20-million film was a huge success, easily the highest grossing film (earning $210 million approx.) of 1981, and, at the time, one of the highest-grossing movies ever made. According to the 2005 edition of The World Almanac (from Variety data), the first two Star Wars films are the only pictures released prior to 1981 that have out-earned Raiders.

The box office success of the film led to a prequel — Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and a sequel Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). A fourth, as yet title-less, movie is apparently in pre-production for 2006. The Indiana Jones franchise eventually expanded to books, games, a television series, and even theme park attractions. (See Indiana Jones for more information.)

Raiders of the Lost Ark was nominated for eight Academy Awards in 1982 and won four (Best Sound, Best Film Editing, Best Visual Effects, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration). It won numerous other awards including seven Saturn Awards. In 1999 the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Newer video boxes of the movie (VHS and DVD) are titled Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, in order to correlate with its sequels. However, the restored prints of the film that are transferred to video do not change the onscreen title from its original.

Credits

• Direction: Steven Spielberg
• Cast: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, John Rhys-Davies, Alfred Molina, and Denholm Elliott
• Writing credits: George Lucas (story), Philip Kaufman (story) and Lawrence Kasdan (screenplay)
• Composer: John Williams
• Editor: Michael Kahn
• Sound effects editor: Richard L. Anderson, who included the Wilhelm scream in the film
• Producers: Howard Kazanjian, George Lucas, Frank Marshall, Robert Watts

Trivia

• In the classroom scene near the beginning of the film, a male student leaves an apple for Professor Indiana Jones among the crowd of adoring female students.

• The gag where Indiana Jones shoots the sword-wielding assassin in the market was improvised on the set. Harrison Ford had been suffering from dysentery and exhaustion due to the extreme heat of Tunisia during filming. As originally planned, the scene was elaborately choreographed, with Indy facing the expert swordsman and trying to defeat him with just his whip. Some footage of the planned fight was shot (and was seen in at least one of the movie's trailers) but the filming was proving to be very tedious, and at some point Ford had had enough. It has been widely reported that he said to Spielberg, "Why don't we just shoot the fucker?" Spielberg liked the idea, scrapped the rest of the fight scene, and filmed the brief sequence of the shooting that appears in the movie.

• The scene in which Jones threatens Belloq with a bazooka was shot in the exact same Tunisian canyon where George Lucas shot a scene involving Tusken Raiders attacking Luke Skywalker in his 1977 Star Wars.

• Pat Roach, the actor who played the large mechanic with whom Indy brawls in the famous plane sequence was seen as such a formidable physical opponent for Jones that he returned in both The Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade in similar roles as huge, burly fistfighters.

External links

• IndianaJones.com, the official site
• TheIndyExperience.com,
• Raiders of the Lost Ark at IMDb
• Indy-Net.co.uk
• The Light of Indiana Jones - the first and the only (frequently updated) Slovak site devoted to Indiana Jones and his world.