Raiders!
Raiders!
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Spielberg’s Beard, Ten Years On
by Joe Fordham (May 1991)
In the early 1970s, Francis Coppola's advice to George Lucas – to grow a beard to give the young filmmaker credibility in the face of cigar chomping studio executives – became firmly established as a badge for the up-and-coming filmmaker. Steven Spielberg joined that club in 1980 when he laid his razor aside for the filming of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Raiders was a breakthrough film for Spielberg in many ways. It reassured his place in filmdom – if that needed reassuring – and earned him the freedom to go on to make E.T.. He was no longer the latest whiz kid. He had earned his stripes.
Spielberg and Lucas brought us a grand homage to serial action films. The film was an instant smash in the U.S., it had a slower start in Britain but quickly gained traction in the rest of Europe, and was notably hot in Paris where the French have always been receptive to the Howard Hawks/John Ford U.S. film dynamic. Raiders arrived unexpectedly, after the nervous mystery surrounding its production. The film’s first re-release, a year later, cemented its popularity with a rejuvenated poster and (in Britain) 70mm experiments in provincial towns. The filmmakers had scored, revitalized a genre, and had once again won their audiences' hearts.
Thanks to Philip Kaufman relinquishing his post as the project's original director, Raiders came to Spielberg at a time when he was pondering the completion of his magnum opus Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and being first exposed to his first major critical backlash in response to 1941 ("Fools... bureaucratic fools"). Spielberg has been quoted as describing himself as the workman who pulled the team together, fired by his own vision, inspired by an amalgam of Tailspin Tommy and Lawrence of Arabia.
The result is a gritty, witty, luminous and pulsing film, with a relentless sense of fun and invention. The filmmakers only slip at one scene when they don't resolve the fate of Indy on the submarine, but even this may be viewed as in keeping with the style of the old Republic serials, who could eschew a logical escape at the final cliffhanger simply based on the virtue that their audience were kids and would forget the details of their hero’s predicament by next Saturday's installment.
Humor cuts through all the usual boundaries and lifts the action – often gory, always tough – to exhilarating highs beyond the standard red-meat Chuck Norris Cannon fodder. Characters poke fun at each other with a world-wearied self-awareness, without ever reverting to the wink-at-the-camera camp school of 'genre' filmmaking. There is a reality about the movie, frequently studded with chilling moments of great cinematic poetry and power: Indy's eye framed in the shadows of the Raven saloon, repeated later in the astrologer's house in Cairo... or the 'bad dates' scene with a dead monkey seen through the rotating fan – music... or Indy on the mountain top at the Tanis dig framed against the sun, he adjusts his hat, Sallah's men all chant... these are the lyrical touches of cinematic sensibility in its prime.
Commissioned by George Lucas and produced in tandem with all stages of production, from conceptual meetings to final cut, the 'Making of Raiders' that most fans have seen is only a fragment of the full film, a unique and extraordinary 'how to' guide covering production of a big budget studio film, for the film school instruction – an inspired gift to future filmmakers.
The communal experience is positive and up-lifting. A private viewing is revealing and diverting. It's a very clever movie, but not too smart for its own good. A real refreshing dose of 'what it's all about,' and still a prime time occasion on TV, ten years old, chopped to pieces as a panned and scanned, commercial littered rerun.
So, until the widescreen letterboxed, super stereo laserdisc appears... “Life goes on, Indy"... "Adios, Sapito"... "This is it, this is where Forrestal cashed in"... (but most importantly) "Stay out of the light."
Imagery © Paramount Pictures / Lucasfilm; apart from:
‘Raiders God’ and ‘Cairo Joe’ modified by Flashfilms; and ‘Re-release Poster 1988’ by Reinout Goddyn
Reprinted with permission, SSFS © May 1991
ISSN 0883-6094