Spielberg, Witney & English.

The new Indiana Jones movie has opened to a mixed reception. Its evolution is well known.

Back in 1977 George Lucas had had a phenomenal success with Star Wars (later re-birthed Star Wars Episode 7 - A New Hope ).  If a retread of  Flash Gordon could coin it, Lukas, Stephen Spielberg and their mates figured that they could clean up with the old Chapter Play format. They brought in a copy of Don Winslow of the Navy, a serial which Ford Beebe and Ray Taylor turned out for Universal in 1942 but they got bored and gave up watching a few episodes in. This was probably their first experience of the form since puberty and the real thing didn’t match their childhood memories. However its cliff hanger, with the hero menaced by a giant churning propeller, turned up in the resulting Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That was good for a five movie, near half-Century blockbuster series, which cemented lead Harrison Ford into superstardom. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the current release, cost three hundred million dollars. What had been an exercise in nostalgia has itself now been around long enough to generate its own nostalgia phenomenon, with Palace serving it up with a cup of tea on pensioner days.

My own exposure to serials had come with Saturday Matinee shows of the pre-television days, when neighborhood theaters competed in the number they could jam in to attract the highly selective kiddie public. I was ripped off. Columbia had a monopoly here, so in my most impressionable years I was deluged with the output of the Sam Katzman Unit. I won’t say it was the trough in the development of the serial form. The Weiss Brothers, for a while employers of John Wayne, could give them heavy competition there but Katzman’s serials were totally formulaic. In the same tacky locations, the same obscure support actors menaced a succession of scaled down comic strip heroes. Directors Thomas Carr and Fred F. Sears did their best. Veteran Spencer Benet never even tried. Later I would get a buzz out of The Man With Bogart’s Face’s camera panning from the Hollywood Sign to the mouth of the Bronson Canyon cave Katzman kept on using to introduce their own plaster studio cave interior. In every serial, they managed to re-cycle the hut they blew up on the back lot early fifties, even including the Athurian one, where it falls victim to a round bomb with a fuse hanging out of it.

Naturally Protea, Pearl White, Dr. Mabuse and Fantômas were unknown to the Saturday Matinee trade but Columbia’s cuckoos in the nest also managed to keep the work of the great Republic teams out of all but the most down market area movie houses. Exceptionally I did manage to crack it for an Episode of Zorro’s Fighting Legion at Redfern Lawson. Little surprise that I was at pains to inject these into later film society events, pursued them into London’s Cartoon Cinemas, for a sustained innings at Langlois’ Paris Cinémathèque, where beautiful first generation copies played in original language four hour sessions and a swansong on Channel 24 before Mal Turnbull pulled their plug in lock step with Trumpy and US public broadcasting.

Well, hopes of a return of the old buzz survive the first reels of the new Indian Jones and the Dial of Destiny. C.G. de-aged Harrison Ford arrives in German Uniform, trying to retrieve another mythic relic, the Lance of Longinus, which Adolf Hitler imagines will reverse his WW2 losses. However, rather anticlimactically, this proves to be a fake modern replica and attention switches to the Antikythera of Archimedes and the Fuhrer’s own archaeologist, Mads Mikkelsen no less, heading up a squad of Nazi goons, roughing up Indy’s side kick academic Toby Jones in (and outside) a variety of motor bikes, armored cars, trains in tunnels or bombed bridges. (Remember Lost Ark's “trucks - what trucks?”). There’s the usual gobbledygook about supernatural powers but Mads has worked it out. He plans a date with history.

An edit and socks are drying on the sixties tenement balcony clothes line while an authentically aged Ford's Dr. Indy bangs on his hippie neighbors’ door with a baseball bat, in a New York of Nescafe, Moon Walks on fuzzy TV, Angela Davis lookalikes, overhead projectors and quarter inch tape decks. Ford’s on the point of retiring and his history department presents him with a glass box clock, which he passes on to the first homeless man he meets on a traffic crossing. However his gloomy retirement is disrupted by a pushy, British accented young woman, who is the only one who had any idea of what his boring lecture on Mediterranean pottery was all about.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - Waller-Bridge & Ford.

 

 

Yes, it’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge the much publicised leading lady of Fleabag, who proves able to assert herself in the familiar Lukasfilm comic strip world, where despite all her determined athletics Cate Blanchette had been lost. Phoebe is Indy’s goddaughter grown and she gets to share in the pursuits, shoot-outs and grouchy one liners. Ford demands “Why are you chasing this thing that made your father crazy?” describing the relic changing hands between greedy owner-dealers and she comes back “That’s Capitalism.”

With a touch of the Werner Von Brauns, Mikkelsen meanwhile has got the inside track with the U.S. President, having enabled the Moon Shot and, after doing Space, he’s moved on to Time. Mads understands the significance of Archimedes’ dial, which has survived Toby’s instruction to Indy to have the thing destroyed.

Well, cut to the chase - literally - with the disposal of various henchmen and the dash through the Macy’s day parade on a traffic cop’s horse, like the one that Dennis Weaver’s Sam McCloud copied from Clint Eastwood in Coogan’s Bluff. This kicks off the succession of colourful locations, linked by the little plane’s dotted line on the map again.

Harrison Ford & George Lucas.

Here, rather than build excitement, the relentless scene changing and stunt action makes attention wander, in a two hour thirty four minute movie. Are the accelerated re-caps in the chapter breaks a necessary part of the experience? 

 

We get Ford/ Indy touring the Arab world and the Mediterranean with another diversity hire boy side kick in light fingered Ethan Isidore, and Greek (!) Antonio Banderas’ deep sea diving introducing eels to evoke our hero's fear of snakes. Add a tunnel full of scorpions. The Tuk Tuk Material isn’t as imposing now that we’ve seen Gerard Jugnot do Pourris gâtés and what happens to that ride along Nazi aviator? 

 

Phoebe’s change of heart is like the attempt to give our hero a back story with the Shia LaBoeuf character from Ep. Four evoked as a Nam vet, not to mention the new happy ending. More promising is seeing our hero mesmerised by the Siege of Syracuse, after a lifetime of study, though it’s that same destructive Indy, melting off the millennia-old inscription to get to the gold disk. None of this resonates the way it needs to. 

The cast are great and technical work is faultless but we’ve been there, seen that.

By accident, Dial of Destiny surfaced when I was half way through the so nice You Tube copy of Republic’s l940 vintage, twelve episode King of the Royal Mounted, handled by William Witney and John English in their prime. Identical hopes shape the exploits of both Dr. Indy and Sergeant King. Seeing the productions together was extraordinarily revealing. I came away with some disturbing conclusions about popular entertainment. 

Allen Rocky Lane.

Before America's entry into WW2, Allen Rocky Lane couldn’t be seen to be opposing Germans so he was up against “the World’s Largest Secret Espionage Organisation” which sends an implausibly under-manned Submarine into Mackenzie Sound to drop off Master Spy Robert Strange. The bad hats have discovered that Compound X, previously used to cure Polio can be deployed in magnetic mines to wipe out the allied U-Boat blockade. ( "...and I thought you wanted to help with infantile paralyis")

The R.C.M.P. appear to be at a distinct disadvantage as Strange, scar-faced Harry Cording and busy Bryant Washburn (memorable opposite Joseph Schildcraut & Bessie Love in the De Mille Young April) have a seemingly unlimited force of expendable pug uglies (career serial henchman Jack Ingram isn’t even listed on the paper work) while the Mounties are restrained by the fact that wardrobe can only manage half a dozen uniforms, with their pointy hats and pistols on lanyards. This is particularly problematic when they have to parade the entire contingent for Herbert Rawlinson’s funeral.

Just like Dial of Destiny, this one catches us off guard by killing off good guys. Similarly they back-story their characters, with Lane the son of station commander Rawlinson, having to prove himself a worthy successor and sub-hero Robert Kellard and heroine Lita Conway, brother and sister who grew up in the forest environs of their dad‘s Caribou Pitchblende Mining Company, knowing the hidden locations of trails and auxiliary shafts. This interest in pitchblende anticipates the WW2 F.B.I. putting agents onto Alfred Hitchcock when he referenced it for Spellbound. 

Like Waller-Bridge and sixty years before Me Too, Conway has to be shown an active participant, dropping flares from her stolen plane and swinging onto the rope that prevents trapper Bud Buster’s spiked bear trap from descending on Rocky.

King of the Royal Mounted - Washburn, Lane & Strange

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Regulars will already have seen those transfers between galloping horses or speeding speed boats exploding on the rocks, the plane crash, the timber finish van going off the highway, reproduced as miniatures by the Lydeckers, who MGM had to borrow from Republic to generate Thirty Second Over Tokyo. Their submarine, shown up by surface tension in the studio tank is not up to standard.

Our hero must of course also face the back projected forest fire, a great big timber mill saw which takes a real long time to get nearer and nearer to Rocky, a train crash (the Mounties are remarkably ineffectual in protecting national infrastructure), a vat of bubbling chemicals in a substantial studio treatment plant and, particularly striking, a genuine dam spillway which Sergeant King gets sucked through.

The keen eyed will spot our hero metamorphosing into Dave Sharpe for these exploits, though Lane does turn up in the reverse angles or struggle back to the surface after the high dives. The stunt work, always deft at Republic, is particularly vigorous here but we can’t help noticing they impose a tree branch between the camera and the double who does that nice vault into the saddle.

Lane could manage a couple of expressions - dauntless and brow furrowed, which gets him through. His Sergeant King shows up again in Witney’s imaginatively titled 1942 King of the Mounted. He went on to front a series of Rocky Lane B westerns. Sidekick (“Take over Tom”) Robert Kellard also stayed with the force, heading up Perils of the Royal Mounted in 1942.

By contrast, Dial of Destiny involved a slate of A-Listers and the skills of flocks of the best technicians drawing on an extra sixty years of technical advances. You can see three hundred million dollars on the screen. The same aspirations are at play. The makers also swell their theme as the familiar silhouette of their adventurer hero races from one peril to the next. I was almost embarrassed to feel that knee jerk excitement, when Sergeant Rocky galloped through the piney woods, as Californian Redwoods doubled for the Canadian wilds, to the strains of Cy Feuer’s small studio musician orchestration with a bit of “The Maple Leaf Forever” thrown in. However I got bored with Indiana Jones’ relentless parade of genuine location action set piece spectaculars, propped up by John Williams now familiar march. Dial of Destiny echoed the let down represented by the 1932 Pál Fejös 1947 Jean Sascha and 1964 André Hunebelle Fantomases or the 1963 Georges Franju Judex. Let's not start on the later Perils of Paulines.

Now this is, to my surprise, not the way the nostalgia mechanism should work. I belong to the Lukas-Speilberg generation. I followed Harrison Ford's exploits over five decades, while Witney and English were never part of my childhood picture going. Their cut price efforts should have been out classed. However, while the adventures of Indiana Jones now merge in my memory, after a life time I have distinct recall on Reed Hadley’s Zorro, Tom Tyler’s Captain Marvel and Henry Brandon being Fu Manchu. 

Maybe I value these because it was so much more effort to find them but I can’t help feeling that the difference is that Republic’s hard scrabble units had an understanding and a sympathy with the form that the super spectacle guys would never achieve, because deep down they felt they were on a holiday between their serious efforts. That’s an educated guess but I do find myself coming back to it in the time I spend on these. Of course, I’ll never know the real truth, always assuming there’s a real truth to know. 

Barrie Pattison 2023.