Raiders of the Lost Ark

Raiders of the Lost Ark knows how good it is. It also knows better than to slow down long enough for you to think about it.

The movie is a throwback to the Republic serials of the 1930s, those breathless chapter-plays where the hero was left hanging from a cliff every week. Harrison Ford plays Indiana Jones, an archaeologist who moonlights as a two-fisted adventurer, or possibly the other way around. The U.S. government enlists him to find the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis do. That’s about all the plot you need.

What makes Lawrence Kasdan’s screenplay so effective is a trick of momentum. Each scene causes the next. Indy finds a clue, which leads to a person, who sends him to a place where trouble is already waiting. The chain of cause and effect is wound so tight you won’t even notice our hero riding the outside of a German U-boat to get to the third act. You’ll be too busy gripping your armrest.

Transcripts of the story conferences reveal three minds working toward the same goal. Producer George Lucas generated set pieces with the ease of a man pulling rabbits from a hat, but kept one eye on the budget. Director Steven Spielberg tested each scene against how a crowd would react. Kasdan stitched the episodes into a story that tracked. The film also owes a debt to Philip Kaufman, whose earlier treatment gave Lucas a foundation, much as Leigh Brackett’s draft anchored The Empire Strikes Back. Nobody mentions Kaufman enough. If you want to see what happens when Lucas works alone, the Star Wars prequels are waiting.

As Jones, Ford pulls off something I’d have thought beyond any single actor: a character more iconic than Han Solo. The jacket and fedora owe something to Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The physical confidence evokes Gable in Mogambo. But the self-deprecating humor is Ford’s own, and it makes the character. Watch the truck chase. Jones hijacks the vehicle, gets thrown through the windshield, dragged beneath the undercarriage in a stunt borrowed from Yakima Canutt’s legendary work in Stagecoach, and claws his way back into the cab to throw the driver out. After all that he allows himself a cocky little smirk. Then his eyes go wide at what’s coming next. We laugh and cheer because Ford sells both halves: the swagger and the panic. A hero who never doubts himself is a bore. A hero who doubts himself for half a second, then pushes through anyway, is someone you root for.

Spielberg directs with a confidence that feels almost reckless. His desert panoramas have the sweep of David Lean. His action is cut for clarity, not to disguise the seams. Consider the opening. We see Indy only from behind. A map is consulted, a treacherous guide draws a revolver, the hammer cocks. Then the whip cracks and the gun falls. Only now does Spielberg give us the close-up, Ford’s eyes filling the screen beneath the brim of the hat. Like the finale of Casablanca, the drama isn’t on the page, it’s in the editing.

Or take the moment when Indy visits an old flame’s bar. As he enters, his shadow falls across the wall behind her, large and dark. Spielberg could have just walked Ford through the door. Instead he found an image that tells you everything about their history without a word of dialogue. The old serial directors managed touches like this once in a while, when the schedule and the budget allowed. Spielberg does it every ten minutes.

But Raiders of the Lost Ark has no interest in pretension. It simply wants to make grown-ups feel the way those old serials made kids feel. It succeeds so completely that anything more would be beside the point.