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Raiders of the Lost Ark (Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark for the DVD version), is a film released by Paramount Pictures in 1981. It is the first Indiana Jones movie ever released, although the twenty-fourth chronologically.
Plot Summary
Set in 1936, the story begins with Dr. Indiana Jones' journey into a Peruvian jungle with a few local guides to find an ancient treasure. 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 Hovitos 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 the Well of Souls.
The maps shown in the movie
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.
Indy and Sallah in the Well of Souls
After attempting to stop the pilot, Indy gets entangled in a fight with a 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 a 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 Episode IV: A New Hope, 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!"
Steven Spielberg had expressed an interest in directing a James Bond film, but to no avail from EON Productions, the company that owned the rights to the character. Lucas convinced his friend Spielberg that he had conceived a character "better than James Bond": Indiana Jones. While on holiday in Hawaii, 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.
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).
In 1998, the American Film Institute placed the film at number 60 on its top 100 films of the first century of cinema. In 1999 the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
A fourth, as yet untitled, movie is apparently in pre-production for 2007. The Indiana Jones franchise eventually expanded to books, games, a television series, and even theme park attractions. (See Indiana Jones for more information.)
An amateur shot-for-shot remake was made by Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb. It took the boys seven years to finish from 1982-1989. It was discovered by Eli Roth, given notoriety by Harry Knowles of aintitcoolnews and acclaimed by Spielberg himself.
A now legendary fan film called Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is a shot-for-shot remake of the original Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). It was made by three teen-age boys in Mississippi, listed above, over the course of seven years. Their production wrapped in 1989, and was shelved and forgotten until 2003 when a copy fell into the hands of Eli Roth (writer/director of Cabin Fever (2002) who passed on a copy to Steven Spielberg . Spielberg congratulated the boys on their hard work, and said he looks forward to seeing their names on the big screen. Scott Rudin and Paramount Pictures have purchased the trio's life rights and will be producing a film based on their adventures making their remake, known as Untitled Daniel Clowes Project (2006).
Awards
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.
Home Video
Raiders DVD cover
For its 1999 VHS re-issue, and the subsequent DVD release four years later, the outer package has been retitled Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. However, the title in the film itself remains unchanged, even in the restored DVD print. The newer video boxes of the movie on VHS and DVD are likely titled Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark in order to correlate with the film's prequel and sequel.
Video Games
The only video game based exclusively on this movie is Raiders of the Lost Ark (Atari 2600), released in 1982 by Atari for their Atari 2600 console.
Trivia
- Steven Spielberg suggested casting Harrison Ford as Jones, but George Lucas objected, stating that he didn't want Ford to become his "Bobby DeNiro" or "that guy I put in all my movies." Desiring a lesser known actor, Lucas convinced Spielberg to help him search for a new talent, and the actor they both became keen for was Tom Selleck, who possessed features similar to Ford's and a much larger physical frame. However, Selleck was infamously unavailable for the part because of his commitment to the television series Magnum, P.I.. Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman, and Tim Matheson were also considered for the role of Jones. But in the end, Spielberg convinced Lucas to offer the role to Ford, who graciously accepted.
- 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 Jones 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, both for Ford and the crew, and at some point Ford had had enough. It has been widely reported that he said something to Spielberg along the lines of, "Why don't we just shoot the fucker?" or "Why don't we just shoot the son of a bitch?" Spielberg liked the idea, scrapped the rest of the fight scene, and filmed the brief sequence of the shooting that appears in the movie.
- Comic book artist Jim Steranko was commissioned to produce original illustrations for pre-production, which heavily influenced Spielberg's decisions in both the look of the film and the character of Indiana Jones himself.
- In the scene where Jones threatens to destroy the ark, he's holding a Soviet RPG, which didn't appear until well after the war. He should be using either an anti-tank rifle or a rifle-fired grenade, since the film takes place years before the outbreak of the Second World War.
- The scene in which Jones threatens Belloq with an rocket propelled grenade was shot in the exact same Tunisian canyon where George Lucas shot a scene involving Tusken Raiders attacking Luke Skywalker in his film Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
- Later in the scene, when Belloq is negotiating with the Panzerschreck-toting Jones, it appears that a fly crawls into actor Paul Freeman's mouth. In the DVD version, however, you can see it fly off at the moment it "enters" his mouth.
- Pat Roach, the actor who played the large mechanic with whom Jones brawls in the famous plane sequence was seen as such a formidable physical opponent for Jones that he returned in both Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in similar roles as huge, burly fistfighters.
- In the airplane scene, a drivechain can be seen turning the plane's undercarriage.
Can you find R2 and C3PO?
- In the scene where Indiana Jones is lifting the Ark of the Covenant out of its holding place in the Well of Souls, one of the hieroglyphs is meant to resemble Star Wars characters C-3PO and R2-D2.
- When Indiana Jones is breaking out of the Well of Souls, he shoves a heavy stone block out of the wall. The sound effects and shadow indicate the block bounced - on desert sand.
- The U-boat scenes were shot at La Rochelle, both outside the harbour and inside the U-boat bunkers there, built by the Germans in 1942. Filming was done here due to the need to obtain a U-boat to film with — the film "borrowed" the U-boat that was being prepared for filming Das Boot.
- The film was originally set to be rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America because, during the climax where the Nazis who look at the Ark die, there is a visual of an exploding head. After it was obscured underneath a column of fire, the rating was lowered to PG (there was no PG-13 at the time).
- During the Well of Souls scene, when Indiana stares down the cobra, the snake's reflection is visible in the glass separating the two to prevent the cobra from actually harming any of the actors (the reflection was digitally removed for the 2003 DVD release).
- There were three stunt doubles for Harrison Ford, the primary one being British born stunt man Vic Armstrong, who reportedly resembled Ford to the degree that people off camera often mistook him for the real Ford. But Ford fought to do much of the fights and stunts himself, citing there wouldn't have been much else for him to do if he wasn't in the thick of it.