Why The Last Crusade Is The Best Indy Film
By Mark Dinning, Editor
A strange thing happened when we conducted the first of our many interviews with the cast and crew of Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. The interviewee in question was producer Frank Marshall. All was going well, our anticipation at fever pitch. But then Marshall said four words that sent a shockwave through certain quarters of the Empire office… He dropped these four words into conversation casually, but they were discussed very seriously and for very many weeks afterwards.
These four words? "Tonally, think Last Crusade."
The Raiders devotees' hearts melted ever so slightly; The Temple Of Doom nuts felt theirs ripped out. But come May 22, Spielberg and co will be proved quite correct. As a kicking off point for Part IV, Dr Jones' last hoorah is the right, as well as the logical, place to start.
As a boy, of course, I was Indiana Jones, and Last Crusade was in fact my least favourite adventure. I'd seen Raiders aged 7 and had subsequently declared that bit where the Nazi's face falls off the Greatest Ever Moment In Cinema. Aged 10, I'd thoroughly enjoyed my further adventures in Temple Of Doom, what with all that eyeball soup and blood and guts. Sadly, however, the advancing years meant that by the time I embarked on my Last Crusade I was a petulant, fuck-the-Man 15 year-old, and watching Sean Connery berate Harrison Ford felt rather like paying to be moaned at by my own old man - something I could always enjoy for free at home.
What's interesting is how well the movie has aged with me. Coming as it did in the wake of a pioneering original and its "darker" sequel, Last Crusade was lumbered with its Return Of The Jedi reputation before the Paramount logo had even morphed into the mountain for a third time. But the reality is that it is by far the funniest and easily the most entertaining Indy entry, having the common sense to return to the rules Spielberg and Lucas had established on that beach in Hawaii all those years previously, and then very nearly pissed away with the tonally peculiar (and that's being generous) Temple Of Doom.
Jeffrey Boam's initial screenplay - based on a story by Lucas and Menno Meyjes and polished with copious notes from Connery - is both laconic and whip-smart, reintroducing Denholm Elliott's Brody, John Rhys-Davies' Sallah and a decent MacGuffin, the Holy Grail up there with the Ark in terms of mythic resonance and a world away from the narratively impotent Sankara Stones. It is packed with imagination and action - Speedboats! Tanks! Planes! Motorbikes! Zeppelins! - with its terrific set-pieces progressing the plot at lightning pace. But it is also the most literate and witty ("I'm as human as the next man." "I was the next man") courtesy of a Tom Stoppard rewrite. And, most importantly, it has more humanity than the other two Indys put together, Connery and Ford's chemistry instantly lifting the gloom of Doom and even improving on that of Raiders. Can Ford and Shia LaBeouf pull off something similar in Crystal Skull? Marshall's not saying, and at this point it is still not known for certain if theirs is a father/son dynamic at all, but the promise is tantalising.
Last Crusade also takes our hero on his most international caper yet, from Mexico to the South Pacific to Venice to Turkey, all via a chance encounter with Hitler at a book-burning rally in Berlin - the most ambitious idea in the franchise. But, crucially, for all his globetrotting, what it does best is bring Indy full circle, from an opening sequence that demystifies the famous chin-scar and snake phobia to one of the most perfect closing shots of all time - the greatest hero ever conceived galloping happily into the sunset. It's an entire trilogy distilled into just two hours and seven minutes, and that makes it the wisest choice of all.
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