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Dashing archaeologist dusts off his old fedora

The Post and Courier

The Post and Courier

Indy was born when Cubby said no.

Still flush from the success of "Jaws," and with "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" soon to debut, Steven Spielberg wanted to make a James Bond movie. But mindful of the personal stamp the director imposed on his films, the man guarding the gates of the 007 franchise, longtime producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, turned him down flat.

Not long thereafter, in May 1977, Spielberg and buddy George Lucas were commiserating. It was just days after the premiere of "Star Wars" in a handful of the nation's theaters and Lucas was nervous, fearing his little space opera was going to be an unmitigated disaster. Weeks later, he would be ecstatic, but now, sitting on the beach with Spielberg and listening to his pal's Bondian lament, Lucas had an idea.

"So I said, 'Well, look, Steven, I've got a James Bond film. It's great — just like James Bond but even better," Lucas recalled last year. "I told him the story about this archaeologist and told him it was like this Saturday matinee serial, that he just got into one mess after another.

"And Steven said, 'Fantastic! Let's do this."

And it came to pass that this back-burner notion, tucked away in Lucas' voluminous to-do files, would go on to make cinematic history.

Lucas was right; "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981) was little more than a gussied-up feature-length version of the 1940s' cliffhanger shorts that had been recycled for young baby boom audiences of the late '50s and early '60s. But what a version. Fast-paced and vivid, "Raiders" crystallized all the great things about those cheesy wartime adventures, with their rambunctious heroes and nefarious Nazis, then infused them with high production values, tongue-in-cheek humor, exotic settings and the inspired casting of Harrison Ford (after Tom Selleck, legend holds, was forced to give it a pass).

On Thursday, after a 19-year absence from the bijou, one of the most popular series ever whipped onto celluloid is back in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." Don your dusty jacket, slip on the fedora.

Ford may be 65 now — "It's not the years, it's the mileage," as Indy might say — but the fourth film is no "Indiana Jones and the Placid Pools Retirement Village." Do you think Spielberg-Lucas-Ford would give us an Indy without all his moxie, all his resourcefulness and resilience, all his dash?

No, "Crystal Skull" will be a rouser, though expect more than a few wry references to age. The movie also offers the welcome return of Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood ("Raiders"), by far the pluckiest of Indy's heroines, along with four of the finest actors in the business: Cate Blanchett, Jim Broadbent, John Hurt and Ray Winstone, not to mention rising star Shia LaBeouf as Indy's new sidekick.

The screenplay (from a story by Lucas and Jeff Nathanson) is by David Koepp, who has plenty of popcorn movie credits as scripter of "War of the Worlds," "Spider-Man," "Mission Impossible," "The Shadow" and "Jurassic Park."

But he is also the fellow who wrote the sharply satiric "Death Becomes Her" and the tough, gritty "Carlito's Way."

The teaming of Ford and Sean Connery for "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (1989) left a good taste in audiences' collective mouths after the relative debacle of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" (1984), so expectations are high for the latest and (probably) last installment with Ford in the driver's seat.

"Raiders" chronicled events in 1936. Now it's 1957, with Our Man Jones venturing into the jungles of Peru in a race against Soviet agents (the new bad guys) to find the mystical Crystal Skull of Akator. Blanchett plays Russian agent Irina Spalko, who leads an elite military unit on a quest to harness the skull's unlimited power and set the stage for Soviet world domination.

The skull notion of the movie was inspired by a real-world discovery, of sorts. In 1924, when British banker-turned-adventurer F.A. Mitchell-Hedges was excavating in Belize, he unearthed a strange skull in the ruins of a Mayan temple. Carved out of a single block of quartz, it was said to produce an odd sensation when touched. More, whenever Mitchell-Hedges' daughter, Anna, slept with the skull near her bed, her dreams would be of the Maya and their everyday life, including ritual human sacrifices.

Soon, similar skulls were discovered, some finding their way into private collections, others into museums. But 84 years later, the issue still burns: ancient objects imbued with mysterious powers or elaborate hoax?

Vote for the latter. Mitchell-Hedges was notorious for spinning "colorful" stories. Though he traveled widely, donating important artifacts from his finds to the British Museum, his claims of having "discovered" obscure Indian tribes and lost cities (finding Atlantis was his goal in Belize) actually had been found and documented years, sometimes centuries, before his time.

Few such doubts attend the new movie, which, if it lives up to the "Indy's best ever" claim by Ford, will be a "find" all its own.

Reach Bill Thompson at bthompson@postandcourier.com or 937-5707.

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