"If adventure has a name, it's Indiana Jones...."

"Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the most deliriously funny, ingenious and stylish American movies ever made!" -- Vincent Canby, The New York Times


"If adventure has a name, it's Indiana Jones." -- tag line for Raiders of the Lost Ark

In the early summer of 1977, while directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were vacationing in Hawaii shortly after Lucas's "little sci-fi movie" premiered, a beachside conversation turned to the topic of upcoming projects the two friends had on their agendas. Lucas was exhausted from the arduous making of Star Wars, and Spielberg was finishing post-production on his UFO film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

"Well," Spielberg said, "I've always wanted to do a James Bond picture...."

According to Spielberg's introduction to Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Illustrated Screenplay, it was then that Lucas "told me about Archaeologist/Adventurer Indiana Jones and his heroic 'raid' to save the Lost Ark of the Covenant from the sinister clutches of none other than Hitler himself."

George Lucas had long been a fan of the Republic serials -- short episodic films that ran for less than a feature film's running time and told a story over several weeks (usually premiering over consecutive Saturdays -- hence the term Saturday matinee serials). These serials were often from action-oriented genres such as Westerns and science fiction (Flash Gordon) and featured tons of cliffhanger situations, wooden dialog, plot holes the size of China at times, and cheap special effects. Flawed as they were, though, they were apparently very popular and fun to watch.

After the success of his teen-oriented, nostalgia-laden American Graffiti (1973), Lucas considered two possible projects for a film aimed at young people. One centered on an archaeologist/soldier of fortune type of hero named "Indiana Smith," while the other, a sprawling space opera titled The Star Wars, told the story of a young hero named "Annikin Starkiller," who would eventually be renamed Luke Skywalker. He chose to make Star Wars first but placed "Indiana Smith" on the back burner until that fateful conversation on a Hawaiian beach.

After tweaking story ideas and a few other details -- Spielberg, for instance, didn't think "Indiana Smith" was such a hot name, so Lucas changed it to "Indiana Jones" -- a young screenwriter named Lawrence Kasdan (Body Heat, The Empire Strikes Back) was hired, and in a period of 73 days in mid-1980, Raiders of the Lost Ark was filmed in four countries (England, France, Tunisia, and the U.S.).

Set in 1936, Raiders of the Lost Ark pits professor-fortune hunter Jones (Ford) against a team of Nazis in a desperate race to find the legendary Ark of the Covenant, the sacred chest where the Hebrews had placed the fragments of the original Ten Commandments. Lost for nearly 2,000 years, the Ark is coveted not only as an object of great historical import, but as Indy's boss and friend Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) points out, "an army that carries the Ark before it is invincible." Now, Adolf Hitler wants the Ark, and Germany has sent a huge team of archaeologists and soldiers led by the renegade Frenchman Belloq (Paul Freeman) to Egypt in hopes of finding it.

When a secret German cable from Cairo to Berlin is intercepted by U.S. Army intelligence mentioning the lost city of Tanis, a relic called the headpiece of the staff of Ra and Abner Ravenwood, Indy's former instructor and estranged friend, the government hires Indy to find Ravenwood and get to the Ark before the Nazis do. Soon, Indiana Jones will face Gestapo agent Toht (Ronald Lacey), Nepalese thugs, Arab swordsmen, and 7,000 snakes as he dodges bullets, swords and flying fists as he crosses half the world in search of the Lost Ark. Along the way he is joined by Ravenwood's feisty daughter (and former flame) Marion (Karen Allen) and Sallah (John Rhys-Davies), "the best digger in Egypt" and a loyal friend.

Lawrence Kasdan's screenplay, based on a story by Phil Kaufman and George Lucas, keeps the whole endeavor moving like gangbusters and replete with 1930s-style humor in the vein of Michael Curtiz films (such as Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Casablanca). Featuring great stunts (some performed by Ford himself, including the famous rolling boulder in the prologue), fantastic special effects that still hold up over 20 years later, adept directing by Spielberg and a terrific score by composer John Williams, Raiders of the Lost Ark is an adventure film which has truly endured the test of time.

Of all the action-adventure films to come out in the 1980s, Raiders of the Lost Ark ranks head and shoulders above the rest. The Die Hard series of the late '80s and early '90s is pretty good in its own fashion, but it depends far too much on R-rated violence and "shock and awe." The Indiana Jones films, on the other hand, have their share of gunplay and "ewwww" moments -- the shootout in Marion's Nepal bar, the thousands of snakes in the Well of Souls, the "face-melting" wrath of the Ark finale -- but it's all done so broadly and with a lightness to the whole endeavor that one has fun watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. I still remember the first time I saw this in a theater in 1981; we'd be clapping or cheering whenever Indy and his friends got out of a messy situation. Particularly memorable was the one guy a few rows behind me that, during the scene where Marion is trapped in a German "flying wing" bomber and shooting up Nazis with the plane's machine guns, stood up and shouted, "Yeah, baby, blast those suckers!"