RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK took 1981 in a thunderstorm of buoyant make-believe storytelling, technical prowess, cheeky humor and a torrent of furiously cool action. A sure bet hero, a to-die-for lady, timeless treasures to discover in exotic locales and slimy Nazis to polish off  along the way: where do I sign?  George Lucas came up with the idea, worked on it with Philip Kaufman, and when schedules aligned Steven Spielberg came on to direct, with fresh whizzer Lawrence Kasdan as screenwriter and a proven star warrior in the lead. Roger Ebert nailed the consensus: “an out-of-body experience, a movie of glorious imagination and breakneck speed that grabs you in the first shot, hurtles you through a series of incredible adventures, and deposits you back in reality two hours later–breathless, dizzy, wrung-out, and with a silly grin on your face”.  If you think that’s a bad thing, do the rest of us a favor and keep it to yourself.

“Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?”

1936. American archaeologist ‘Dr. Henry Walton Jones, Jr.’ (Harrison Ford, 38), known as ‘Indiana Jones’, or ‘Indy’ to intimates, barely escapes with his life after recovering an idol from a Peruvian temple festooned with boobytraps. A competitor steals the piece; Jones finds that the rotter is assisting Nazi agents. They intend to recover the Ark of the Covenant, the legendary Biblical storage chest; Hitler desires it for its purported supernatural powers. En route to Egypt, where excavation of the Ark is in progress, Jones stops in Nepal where he reunites with former flame ‘Marion Ravenwood’ (Karen Allen, 28), finding that she’s in danger from Gestapo operatives. Clearing the clutches of their adversaries, Indy and Marion arrive in Cairo only to then face off with local mercenaries and German soldiers guarding the dig site. The fate of many will be determined by who gets the Bible box and what they do with it.

Raiding old time serials of the 30’s and 40’s, and with Ford adopting an ‘adventurous archaeologist look’ patterned after that used by Charlton Heston in 1954’s Secret Of The Incas, Spielberg and company pull out all stops and invent a few for good measure. As with his ‘Han Solo’ for Master Lucas, Ford’s laconic style makes a perfect fit for a ‘rascal with a conscience’; on one hand easygoing enough to pass as an academic, on the other rugged enough to duke it out in a dozen different situations, with fists, guns and a handy bullwhip. Rowdy but radiant, Allen is even more of a sigh-inducer than she was in Animal House. Kasdan, 30, was fresh off scripting The Empire Strikes Back and poised to write & direct Body Heat; his screenplay is smart without bogging down in exposition or cluttering tangents and witty without resorting to ‘cute’; he and the cinema-inhaling director drop in a number of perfectly acceptable ‘steals’ (looting artifacts?) from a number of classic pictures. *

Talk’s cheap, especially when you can unleash a blizzard of outstanding action set-pieces—the wild half thriller/half comic Peru opener, the Nepal tavern skirmish, chasing in Cairo, a donnybrook around a spinning airplane, a pit crawling with thousands of snakes, the sensational stunt work in the sequence where Jones clambers aboard and is dragged under and behind a racing truck (five weeks to film a six minute scene), a swordfight that’s rudely/casually/hilariously stopped before it starts, the final conflagration of Holy wrath and unholy special effects: if you’re going to melt faces, smug-mugged Nazis are a good place to start. John Williams whipped up another momentum accelerating score. At a cost of $20,000,000, location shooting was done in France, Tunisia, Hawaii and England.

The critics applauded, the public went gaga and a domestic swipe of $212,200,000 made it far and away the monster smash of the year, with $32,800,000 more pulled in from later re-releases; all told, when the dust of the opened Ark settled, the worldwide gross tabled $389,926,000. **

The Academy Awards, stunned out of their usual ‘meaningful drama’ or ‘Broadway musical’ kowtows, found Oscars for Film Editing, Art Direction, Visual Effects, Sound and Sound Editing, with nominations logged for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography and Music Score.  Still, comparative snorejob Chariots Of Fire limped off with the big prize, but at least an “action picture” finally broke thru the genre snob anesthesia that had waved away the likes of, to cite a few, The Adventures Of Robin Hood, Gunga Din, The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Zulu, The Wind And The Lion and The Man Who Would Be King.***

Photographed by Douglas Slocombe, edited by Michael Kahn, 115 minutes at warp speed, with Paul Freeman (dapper dastard ‘Rene Belloq’), Ronald Lacey (giggling Gestapo fiend ‘Arnold Toht’), John Rhys-Davies (hearty good guy ‘Sallah’), Denholm Elliott (museum curator ‘Marcus’), Wolf Kahler (as ‘Dietrich’, because you can’t have a bunch’a Nazis without a viable ‘Dietrich’), Anthony Higgins, Vic Tablian, Alfred Molina (27, feature debut), Pat Roach (the hulking, happily brutal Luftwaffe mechanic that Indy battles at the airplane—watch those propellers!), Tutte Lemkow, and Terry Richards (that cocky swordsman checkmated by a cocked pistol).

* We once again bow to the acumen of the best reviewer extant, Glenn Erickson, for his perceptive catch of the movie’s using a number of homages to classic films. Here’s the link—https://trailersfromhell.com/raiders-of-the-lost-ark-4k/

** 007 with a PhD—in serial installment fashion Indy’s excavations of excitement dug four sequels of varying quality (the last one unearthed 42 years after the starter, costing 15 times as much and was the least successful of the lot), a prequel TV series and a trove comics, toys, 22 video games and 40 novels.

*** “You can’t do this to me, I’m an American!”—we at Ala’s heavily guarded Central High Command enthusiastically salute Raiders—you’d be a stuffy stiff to dislike it—admire the A-grade quality and grant its influence: a show that inspired people to get into archaeology is reason enough to backhand naysayers. And yet—hold the stolen vase—we have to say that when not tranced by a “I’m buckled in, now blow me away!” mood there are a batch of 1981’s entries I tend to prefer. In no particular order let’s volunteer Prince Of The City, Gallipoli, Das Boot,The Four Seasons, Reds, Cutter’s Way, Body Heat, Atlantic City and Southern Comfort. Don’t whack me with a bullwhip: I like Indy (and dream dish Marion/Karen) as much as the next kid, and look forward to kicking back with this and his other adventures again when the times demand. “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.”

Kasdan: “I think that what they were looking for was someone who could write Raiders in the same way that Hawks would have someone write a movie for him—a strong woman character, a certain kind of hero…George, Steven, and I talked for about 20 minutes. Then we stood up and shook hands, and George said, ‘Let’s make this movie.’ I had just met the guy, and a few minutes later I’m in business with him….We had a tape recorder going, and George essentially guided the story process and the three of us pitched the entire movie in about five days. And that’s where the fantasy of all our pent-up, wet-movie dreams coalesced. Most of the time we were on our feet, trying to out-shout each other with ideas….I look at Raiders now and I’m very proud of it,” he wrote in 1999. “I think it’s a terrific movie and I think Steven did a magnificent job with it.”

Reptiles “R” Us—estimates of the number of snakes procured for the Well Of Souls scene runs from seven to ten…thousand.