After The Color Purple’s critical drubbing, Empire of the Sun’s indifferent commercial performance, and the American network television cancellation of Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade returned to the crowd-pleasing action cinema with which its director was synonymous. The $36 million movie attracted an unprecedented $40 million from exhibitors in non-refundable bids – virtually guaranteeing profit even before release (Taylor 1992: 112). Spielberg and Lucas’s reputations and a cast including three of the hottest stars of their generations (Sean Connery, Harrison Ford and River Phoenix) were only part of the winning combination. The movie reintroduced Raiders of the Lost Ark elements including the characters Brody and Sallah, the latter now unequivocally competent and heroic. Further political caution included reversion to Nazis, rather than non-Europeans, as villains, and a strong and capable, if ultimately treacherous, female lead. First weekend takings, $46.9 million, touted as the highest ever, encouraged other moviegoers. Less was made of the fact that 2,327 prints screened simultaneously and ticket prices had been hiked 50 cents (Baxter 1996: 348).
Spielberg reportedly wanted to compensate for Temple of Doom – ‘not … one of my prouder moments’ – which, he insisted, contained ‘not an ounce of my personal feeling’ (Taylor 1992: 110). Not entirely financially motivated – ‘I could make a whole bunch of pitiful movies, and I’d still be bankable for a while’ – he supposedly directed The Last Crusade to honour an agreement with Lucas to make a trilogy if Raiders of the Lost Ark succeeded (Taylor 1992: 111). If Temple of Doom was expertly crafted but cynical and hollow beyond its sensational, carelessly offensive surface, The Last Crusade was more individual. Along with Always, Hook and Schindler’s List, longstanding ambitions in development at the time, Spielberg made it from choice, not commercial necessity.
The result, though disarmingly facile, sustains the wit, versatility and humour that distinguished Temple of Doom’s opening but gleamed only intermittently thereafter. It develops more complex characterisation and relationships than its predecessors, creating a dramatic foil for comedy and action. If the final ride into the sunset is history’s longest, it is an affectionate farewell, closing not only a chapter in the director’s career but also a film that, for all its blockbuster values, respects its audience and its materials.
Hooray for Hollywood
The Paramount logo this time dissolves into Monument Valley, iconographic setting of John Ford westerns. Non-diegetic chanting, drumming and jungle sounds, utterly gratuitous evocations of Raiders of the Lost Ark’s opening, together with inordinate vegetation matted into the location shots, parody the looseness of Ford’s geography (Stagecoach (1939) traverses Monument Valley repeatedly) and establish an exclusively cinematic milieu – something Temple of Doom, associated by critics with the real India, failed at. A file of horses ridden by figures wearing rangers’ hats again evokes a western, even as the music and fantastic rock formations recall Lawrence of Arabia. The first obvious joke comes with realisation that these are old-fashioned Boy Scouts, while for adults potential pleasure lies in recognising allusions to Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and A Passage to India (the boys are warned, ‘Some of the passageways in here can run for miles’).
Light-hearted and endowed with typical Spielberg traits, the movie cuts to a scene of inscribed spectatorship and continues to flaunt textuality and intertextual relations. The western elements – alluding to the most enduring of genres, yet one that evolved as a specifically American variation of the chase picture – emphasise Jones’ cinematic provenance. Two boys, unobserved, watch an off-screen event casting light onto their faces. Secondary identification occurs as the camera cranes towards the object of their gaze: a man in leather jacket and fedora directing labourers unearthing treasure. As his hirelings, shady as those accompanying Jones at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark, whoop delightedly at becoming rich, the camera reveals him to be played not by Harrison Ford but an actor resembling Spielberg, Jones’ creative progenitor. Fatherhood resonates thematically throughout this movie and retrospectively reinflects its predecessors. The point, of course, whether he resembles Spielberg or Jones, is that he is a mercenary.
‘Indy, Indy’, softly calls one of the boys – not to the man below but to his companion, revealed as the young Jones, precociously expert archaeologist, as a caption anchors the setting: ‘UTAH 1912’. Jones, insisting the artefact belongs in a museum, demonstrates the selfless determination characteristic of the portion of his personality not later corrupted by ‘fortune and glory’. A natural leader, he gives orders to his companion. Contrary to the Scouts’ motto, ‘Be Prepared’, he already manifests improvisational flair; asked his intentions, he replies: ‘I dunno – I’ll think of something.’ Having neither yet lost innocence in this Edenic cinematic Imaginary, nor acquired his single weakness, he grabs a rattler in his bare hands: ‘It’s only a snake.’
Jones whistles, in Saturday serial tradition, for his trusty steed – which he misses when attempting to jump onto it from an outcrop. His adversary more successfully echoes this action, summoning a truck and a car, highlighting similarities between young Jones and this more competent second self. The ensuing chase mimics silent westerns and comedies. Jones’ companion – credited as ‘Roscoe’ – whom he has sent for help, resembles ‘Fatty’ (Roscoe) Arbuckle, whose involvement in a 1920s sex scandal popularly marked the end of Hollywood’s innocence and precipitated the Production Code. His Scout uniform is particularly ironic, given the movement’s phobia concerning sexuality (early manuals famously recommended cold showers).
Jones finds himself on an implausible circus train, recalling The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) – which in interviews Spielberg had celebrated as his first cinematic experience (Taylor 1992: 46–7) – and, in appearance, Dumbo. During a breathless pursuit along wagons containing alligators, rhinos and countless snakes, an overtly phallic python rears up between Jones’ legs, precipitating his fall into the slithering mass below, screaming and panicking. Shortly thereafter, in one-to-one combat, Jones is pinned down on a canvas roof that is penetrated between his thighs by the horn of an enraged rhino. His adult fear of snakes inextricably, if jokingly and knowingly, relates to castration anxieties consequent upon rebellion against a threatening father figure. Attempting escape, he falls into a lion’s cage and grabs a nearby whip to subdue the masculine beast. The moment recalls Willie’s comparison of his appearance with that of a lion tamer in Temple of Doom. He suddenly notices a facial wound where Harrison Ford (hence the adult Jones) is scarred. The physical marking emphasises the incident’s formative nature as, succumbing to patriarchy, he accepts assistance from his enemies, who haul him to safety using the whip.
Fleeing again, Jones, cornered, hides in a trunk. This collapses as the villain enters the luggage car, revealing itself as a magician’s prop: Jones has disappeared. Apparently filmed in a single take – presumably the camera was stopped and restarted – this simple and purely cinematic illusion pays homage to Méliès, fantasy/special-effects pioneer, of whom Spielberg is the best-known heir.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – the Great Train Robbery meets the Dumbo circus train
A close-up reveals his adversary’s admiration as Jones escapes. Shouting ‘Dad! Dad!’ in a plea for protection, the boy returns home only for his father, loath to be disturbed, to halt him with an imperiously raised hand. Jones’ adventurous fieldwork contrasts with his father’s cerebral composure. This scene emphasises the latter’s remoteness by showing only his hands (and pragmatically avoids the difficulty of making Connery look thirty years younger). He calms, but also fobs off, his son by ordering him: ‘Count to twenty. In Greek.’
Accordingly, when a corrupt sheriff (another negative patriarch) leads in the villain and parts Jones from the cross he fought to protect, permitting its sale to a middle-aged man in a white suit – reminiscent of Belloq – the baddies have considerably more presence than the hero’s off-screen father. ‘You lost today, kid’, observes his adult alter-ego. ‘But that doesn’t mean to say you have to like it’, he adds, placing his hat on the young man’s head to the strains of the Indiana Jones theme. He thus confers a raider’s identity, contrasted with the tweedy, bespectacled academic image inherited – we later infer – along with scholarship and independence, from Jones Senior.
Why are there two (three, four …) fathers?
Slavoj Zizek argues that the femme fatale in film noir is a male fantasy embodying universal corruption. Her attraction typically brings the hero into conflict with what Zizek calls ‘the obscene father’, an ‘excessively present father’, all-powerful, cruel and knowing (1992: 158). This contrasts with the traditional father who asserts authority, not literally through open display of power but symbolically, from a position of absence, through ‘the threat of potential power’, so that the Law is unquestioningly accepted (1992: 158–9).
Last Crusade’s multiple hybridity contains noir elements consistent with Zizek’s thesis. Cutting to a nighttime storm on a floundering ship years later, during which Jones’ chin again bleeds as he is beaten while rescuing for the museum the same cross from the same white-suited man, the narrative emphasises continuity in his idealistic rebellion against patriarchal corruption. As the ship sinks, the defeated collector’s hat floats in the foreground, underlining symbolic castration. A comic interlude at the university reintroduces the ineffectual symbolic father, Brody. It also reveals Jones’ unreadiness to accept patriarchal responsibility himself: after an authoritative lecture to smitten co-eds, he exchanges amorous looks with one student before escaping through the window of his tiny office-cum-boiler room (he clearly holds a junior position), to evade hordes of students whose assignments he has not graded. Outside, in the sunshine, shadowy figures observe, beckon and surround him.
Apparently kidnapped, he is collected by agents of a wealthy antiquarian and museum benefactor, the suave Mr Donovan (Julian Glover). Urbane respectability conceals sinister activities. Like James Mason in North by Northwest and Godfrey Tearle in The 39 Steps, Donovan conducts business with the hero with exaggerated courtesy during a party in an adjoining room, prompting his wife to intervene, complaining he is neglecting his guests. Apart from heightening the normality that masks corruption, the wife’s presence inscribes familial relationships into the text, thus rendering Donovan’s relationship to Jones implicitly patriarchal.
The narrative takes a film noir twist when Donovan hires Jones like a gumshoe to investigate another researcher’s disappearance while working for him to locate the Holy Grail. This, it transpires, is Professor Jones Senior. Jones blenches at his father’s name. Tensing like the parricidal Bruno in Strangers on a Train, he describes him as ‘a teacher of medieval literature. The one the students hope they don’t get.’ Nevertheless, on accepting the case he picks up his hat which has been resting in the foreground during the scene, and on arrival back at his father’s house his shadow stretches before him onto the door, suggesting their relationship of both identity and difference, the super-ego that urges him to duty.
Jones’ estranged biological father, now physically as well as emotionally absent – lost object of the narrative instigated by a powerful, present father – equates to the archetypal Grail. Ultimately the journey leads Jones to paternal reconciliation and incorporation into the Symbolic, represented in exclusively male bonding with Jones Senior, Brody and Sallah in the closing shot. It leads initially, though, to the femme fatale, Dr Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody). Her ensnarement lures him to the ultimate obscene father: his face-to-face (uncomfortably present) encounter with Hitler. It precipitates also another obscene father’s symbolic defeat, Donovan’s punishment for betraying both Jones and his country when the Grail – metonym of the Holy Father – destroys him for selfishly pursuing immortality: unnatural prolongation and assertion of presence.
Although Elsa – the only central female – is a betrayer, punished for her treachery, this misogyny operates structurally, as in film noir, rather than in her characterisation. At their initial meeting and during their lovemaking her repartee equals Jones’. Elsa takes the initiative in preceding Jones into the Venice catacombs. She remains cool, and is neither more nor less victimised than Jones, when confronted by thousands of rats and a conflagration. She actively and skilfully pilots a speedboat, eventually rescuing Jones, during a high-speed chase through canals and docks. Her femme fatale role is nevertheless stressed: Jones observes, ‘Since I’ve met you I’ve nearly been incinerated, drowned and chopped into fish bait.’ The library scene, when Jones distracts attention while using a metal post to smash through marble slabs by synchronising his blows with a librarian stamping books, alludes with comic hyperbole to another modern retro-noir, Chinatown (1974), in which the protagonist coughs to cover the ripping of a column from a library newspaper. Polanski’s narrative leads to an excessively present obscene father, as well as sexual entanglements beyond the protagonist’s imagination – as also, in lighter vein, does Jones’.
‘Don’t call me that, please’
Arriving at a Salzburg castle (an exaggeratedly phoney matte shot), Jones is dressed, like a Scout or dutiful son, in his adventurer’s outfit plus an incongruous tie. True to form, when Elsa enquires about his plans he responds: ‘I’ll think of something.’ His solution – significantly, given the as-yet-unrevealed sexual politics of the situation – is to exchange hats with her and enter the castle pretending to be a fussy Scotsman in a beret and mackintosh. The character unconsciously parodies his father (while the film may well be consciously parodying Connery’s impersonation of an American). As Jones, frequently doubled by his shadow, explores, lightning and thunder prefigure with Gothic dread the paternal encounter, more disturbing than being in a Nazi stronghold. After daringly entering through a closed window by swinging on his whip over and back across the courtyard – ‘kiddie stuff’, he nonchalantly tells Elsa – he is hit over the head with a vase. Then his father, emerging into shot in a low-angle close-up, rhyming with Jones’ introduction in Raiders of the Lost Ark, cuts him down to size with a single word:
‘Junior?’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘Junior!’
‘Don’t call me that, please.’
The professor fusses over the broken antique, not Jones’ head. However, the latter rallies, Oedipal rivalry aroused. Asserting archaeological knowledge over his father’s authority, he declares the vase a fake.
Realising Jones can only have located him thanks to his Grail diary, the father thrusts his furled umbrella into the top of his briefcase – unmistakeably Freudian symbolism! – and reconciliation begins as light pours from the window behind Jones onto his father. Mutually proud, rivalry replaced by respect, they exchange compliments – ‘Junior, you did it.’ ‘No, Dad, you did. Forty years.’ Jones continues, like a boy recounting an adventure, but boasting of bravery in the face of the other’s phobia, ‘There were rats, Dad! Big ones!’
Connery’s casting is richly suggestive. As James Bond, he was as much Jones’ precursor as any cowboy, in both his ‘lechery and ironic off-handedness under pressure, the sense of “making it up as he goes along”’ (Baxter 1996: 194–5). (Spielberg wanted to make a Bond movie with Connery but was thwarted; only British directors were employed (Brode 1995: 173).) Certainly The Last Crusade’s powerboat chase resembles a Bond sequence above all. Less widely acknowledged in this context is Connery’s role as an amoral adventurer, living by his own code and in pursuit of what Jones calls ‘fortune and glory’, in The Man Who Would Be King (1975). This epic, based on a Kipling colonial tale and employing spectacular Himalayan settings (actually filmed in Morocco and France), is a clear Indiana Jones prototype. It features, for example, a vertiginous rope bridge which is cut, as in Temple of Doom, crowded Indian market scenes with snake charmers, conjurors and dervishes, and Third World peoples clamouring for leadership from the white protagonists. Priceless treasures abound. The plot involves occult powers and knowledge as its two anti-heroes discover Masonic connections between themselves, Kipling (who appears as a character), and Himalayan priests who recognise their ceremonial seal as that of Alexander the Great before drawing them into their own mythology to fulfil ancient destiny. Clearly the villagers’ anticipation of Jones’ arrival in Temple of Doom parallels this, as does The Last Crusade’s Grail legend.
Harmony shatters after a Nazi enters, calling for Dr Jones. Father and son simultaneously respond. While reflected light flares off Professor Jones’ glasses, metaphorically inscribing the sense of mirroring each other’s desire, they bicker over Jones having brought the diary, the father remarking he ‘should have mailed it to the Marx Brothers’.
Easthope analyses a poster for the film that declares ‘The Man in the Hat is Back – and This Time He’s Bringing his Dad!’, noting how assonance between ‘hat’ and ‘dad’ underlines the headgear’s phallic connotation. The poster also indicates, through Jones’ cocky gaze at the viewer, and his father’s expression (combining pride and suspicion as he watches his son over his shoulder), generational rivalry implicit in ‘Jones’ claim to take over the role of prime popular hero from James Bond’ (1990: 90). The last straw comes when Jones’ father again calls him ‘Junior’, denying the patriarchal status and autonomy of his own name, at which Jones grabs a guard’s machine gun and kills three Nazis in a rage of phallic potency: ‘Don’t ever call me Junior!’
The Oedipal theme complicates when Jones must choose between the woman and his father as a Nazi holds a gun to her head and Jones Senior insists she too is a Nazi. Relinquishing his weapon in unwitting acceptance of castration by the false woman, the obscene father’s proxy, Jones allows Elsa the diary, token of the Symbolic order that epitomised sacred trust between the reconciled true father and son. Asked how he knew Elsa’s real nature, Jones Senior replies, ‘She talks in her sleep.’ Her substitution for the emphatically absent biological mother heightens incestuous undertones; son and father have shared her while she remains the obscene father’s ‘possession’. Both duped, they become equal without the father suffering defeat by the rebellious son or the son succumbing to the Law of the Father. The shared challenge of defeating the obscene father and serving the Holy Father sublimates Oedipal conflict, which manifests instead as more like sibling rivalry. Later, when Jones objects, ‘It’s disgraceful – you’re old enough to be her f… her grandfather’, inability to express his initial thought suggests denial of its implications. The continuing exchange – ‘I’m as human as the next man.’ ‘I was the next man.’ – reasserts equality.
Hereafter, woman having been eliminated as a term between men, the movie treats paternal relationships light-heartedly. Father and son accept mutual dependence. After Jones eloquently praises Brody’s chameleon-like qualities and multilingualism, a crosscut reveals Jones’ surrogate father wandering in a white suit and panama through a Middle Eastern crowd, pleading to all and sundry, ‘Does anyone speak English?’ until Sallah spirits him away from obvious Nazis dressed in black with dark glasses and German accents. It transpires that Jones lies about Brody to deceive his captors: ‘He once got lost in his own museum.’ Jones Senior is similarly incompetent, removing any sense of hostile threat to the hero. Roped back-to-back to his son, he drops the lighter while burning through their bonds and torches the room; when he tries to inform Jones – ‘I want to tell you something’ – the latter replies, emphasising the paternal dimension, ‘Don’t get sentimental now, Dad. Save it for later’, just as the film gears into slapstick. Much of the humour derives from Jones clinging to his briefcase and umbrella, signs of stern paternal authority, while fulfilling the innocently mischief-making role previously taken by Short Round.
Unimpressed by Jones’ derring-do, he is oblivious of the havoc he himself causes. As Jones’ biplane gunner he is warned of fighters at 11 o’clock, only to check his watch in an almost wilful misunderstanding typical of their relationship. When he finally gets the message he shoots off their own tail. Yet his scholarship prevails when he remembers Charlemagne and downs a fighter by using his umbrella to frighten gulls into its path. The incident is followed by a slow, dignified rendition of the Indiana Jones theme, and a reaction shot of Jones, choked with emotion, impressed.
Later, Jones loses his hat just as a runaway tank he is riding plunges over a cliff. The father tells Brody of his remorse concerning filial estrangement: ‘I never told him anything. I just wasn’t ready, Marcus. Five minutes would have been enough.’ Sarah Harwood characterises the 1980s as a decade of failed fathers generally in Hollywood movies. Jones Senior fits her categories of ‘negligent’ and ‘authoritarian’ as well as ‘absent’ fathers (1997: 77). After Jones hauls himself back over the cliff, the two reveal their true emotions: ‘I thought I’d lost you, son.’ ‘I thought so too, sir.’ Again, acceptance supplants rivalry as the two embrace. However, habit intervenes and the father quickly regains his stiff upper lip, brusquely intoning, ‘Righto, well done’ before reasserting authority over his exhausted and battered offspring: ‘Why are you sitting there resting …?’ As Jones is left alone, his hat blows back into frame towards him and the Indiana Jones theme plays in minor key. Paternal acceptance and entry into the Symbolic are a qualified victory.
Nevertheless, as Harwood suggests, this film contrasts with the earlier two, which ended on the Final Romance with the heroine. With Elsa’s punishment,
the confirmed father/son bonding is entirely self-sufficient; all women having been lost along the way. The entire series thus constructs a quest for the father, awakened in Raiders of the Lost Ark but not satisfied until The Last Crusade, in which the sole solution to the absent father is his full restitution which, in turn, denies other familial possibilities. (1997: 81)
Reaganite family values produced a cinema of frequently absent mothers. During a scene when Jones Senior removes his hat, father and son refer cryptically to Jones’ mother. The son angrily takes her side, implying the father’s ‘obsession’ hastened her premature death. The father, however, before replacing his hat, insists she always understood it; and the narrative, in which his learning deprives the Nazis of world-conquering power, vindicates him. The scene’s real significance, though, is return of the repressed. Inscribing the absent mother exceeds narrative necessity. The final, endless ride into the sunset is a masculine fantasy of regression into an Imaginary which denies desire for the mother, an eternally irresponsible freedom disguised as achievement of adulthood. ‘After you, Junior’, says the professor. ‘Yes, sir!’ replies his son, friction between them eliminated. Woman removed from the equation, male competition is purged.
Illumination
The final chase frames shots through observation slits in the tanks, interposing a widescreen view on the action. These internal frames again highlight textuality at the climax of a film that makes preposterous demands on suspended disbelief. After Jones wedges a rock into a tank cannon the barrel explodes when the gun is fired, splitting into a surreal flower as in a cartoon. Yet the explosion kills the gunner using the sight, similarly to the demise of the camera operator penetrated ocularly in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Vision entails power, even as the film deprecates itself as little more than a high-budget Chuck Jones animation. Such alternation – or paradoxical simultaneity – of Imaginary involvement and Symbolic separation is so recurrent it cannot be discounted in considering the popularity of Spielberg’s work.
This passage of The Last Crusade, a hybrid pastiche of the epic, western and war genres, pays homage to the 1950s cinema that nurtured Spielberg. Matthew Bouch explains that ‘widescreen publicity … emphasised realism, technological advance, luxury, and especially participation in the dramatic action, or at least a heightened state of co-presence’ (1996: 9). The trailer for How the West Was Won (1956), he notes, promises audiences will ‘ride with the Indians’, and that ‘the extra-dimensional magic of Cinerama puts you in the picture’ (ibid.). (Note that the mine chase in Temple of Doom incorporates overt allusions to the roller-coaster phantom ride emphasised in trailers for This is Cinerama. Spielberg protagonists such as Neary and Jim put themselves ‘in the picture’.) Bouch quotes The Ten Commandments (1956), which claims, ‘Those who see this motion picture … will make a pilgrimage over the very ground that Moses trod.’ He continues: ‘In this publicity, cinema traversed a liminal nexus and created virtual reality. … fantastical or Biblical subject matter emphasised this extraordinary power, by itself being outside the realm of actuality experienced by the audience’ (ibid.).
The unity of the Imaginary Signifier, then, was offered. Yet the promised pleasure implied spectacle, awareness of illusory immersion and astonishment at the effects; in other words, re-emphasis, in the face of competing leisure activities, of central cinematic properties. Tensions between belief and disbelief, recognised in such early comedies as The Countryman’s First Sight of the Animated Pictures (1901) and Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), have always characterised the medium.
Bouch comments pertinently on Jones, close to reaching the Grail, encountering an abyss. Recalling sacred translations in his father’s diary, Jones moans despairingly, ‘A Leap of Faith!’ Knowing the Grail is the only hope of saving his father, whom Donovan has mortally injured, he instinctively steps onto an impossibly camouflaged bridge:
Belief enables him to perceive the bridge. He must renounce a certain ideological notion of reality and substitute a belief in the act of mimesis: the architect’s [sic] ability to construct a bridge that looks exactly like a bottomless chasm. He must believe in the ‘magical’ goodness of the Grail in order to perceive the representation of the chasm as a bridge. The bridge is then shown as a reality: the representation in its ‘true’ (real) nature. Thus, Indiana Jones becomes one of the audience: he experiences the same process of reification. (1996: 22–3)
Belief, enabling Jones to choose the true Grail, is necessary to resolve the narrative. Meanwhile Jones is again positioned as a child, echoing the credulous spectator’s psychic regression, through crosscutting with the father he strives to save. Doubling and apparent telepathy between the two who now, reconciled, speak in unison although out of earshot, reinforce this notion. Like other similar Spielberg relationships – Elliott and E.T., Jim and the cadet – it intensifies spectatorial involvement by inscribing its like into the intradiegetic relay of the look. Asked by Jones what he discovered in his quest, the professor, contrasting himself with Elsa who ‘never really believed’ and thus dies, replies: ‘Illumination.’ That describes not only the seeker’s eventual spiritual state but also cinema’s material basis, foregrounded in Spielberg’s themes and mise-en-scène.
