TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052989/05298900.065

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 11.6 KB | 227 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 82

What's Old Is Gold: A Triumph for Indy 3


Two roguish stars, Harrison Ford and Sean Connery, shine as the
Jones boys in this summer of the sequels

By Richard Corliss


    "Tell me a story, Dad."

    So the father tells a story of a modern knight in fedora
and leather jacket, a disinterested seeker of treasure and truth
who leaps vast crevices, evades killer boulders, outwits nasty
Nazis and dodges vengeful spirits while searching for the
legendary Ark of the Covenant. The child is beguiled, and Dad
is impressed, despite himself. Pretty good yarn Raiders of the
Lost Ark.

    Next night. "Tell me another story the same, but
different.'' This time Dad sends the rogue archaeologist to
India to battle child-enslaving thugs, take a roller-coaster
ride through lower Hades and narrowly escape the world's first
heart surgery performed without benefit of anesthesia Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom.

    "Pretty scary, huh, Son?" The child shivers, then shrugs.
Third night. "Tell me another story, Dad -- the same, but
different and better!" Moviegoers have two surrogate
storytelling dads: George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Lucas, who
dreamed up Star Wars for a generation of space cadets, is the
mastermind of the Indiana Jones series. Spielberg directed the
trilogy, which reaches its thrilling climax this week when
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade opens on 2,327 movie screens
in the U.S. and Canada. The star is Harrison Ford -- three times
Indy Jones, three times Star Wars' Han Solo and the unchallenged
hero of a derring-do, me-too movie decade.

    And for their newest, most invigorating collaboration,
these three godfathers of the '80s action epic have adopted a
father of their own. Sean Connery, who as James Bond helped sire
the thrill-machine genre, brings his masterly charm to the role
of Indiana's estranged dad Henry Jones. Lucas and Spielberg,
Ford and Connery prove that a sequel can be as fresh as the face
of a teenage Indy confronting his first hairbreadth challenge.
Indy 3 is the same, different and better. It infuses vitality
into the action-adventure, a movie staple whose ravenous
popularity and endless, predictable permutations have nearly
exhausted it.

    Something similar might be said of Hollywood this summer --
the so-called summer of the sequels. Between now and August,
moviegoers will be offered up seconds of Ghostbusters and
Lethal Weapon, a third Karate Kid, fifths of Star Trek and A
Nightmare on Elm Street, an eighth Friday the 13th and, for the
17th time around, James Bond, in Licensed to Kill.

    Is this sequel mania evidence of economic health or of
creative bankruptcy? Cunningly, the theatrical-film industry has
held its ground against the marauding armies of the video
revolution. In fact, one format has fed the other, as audiences
first view pictures on the big screen, then supplement their
cinema appetite at home. Last year saw record grosses both for
theatrical films and for videocassettes. But movie budgets have
increased as well, and even a gambling man turns cautious with
$40 million on the table. Hence the moguls have relied on brand
names and roman numerals.

    This summer, the experts say, everything old is gold again.
"1989 has the makings to break all records," says Larry
Gerbrandt of Paul Kagan Associates, a media-research firm.
"We're seeing sequels to some of the most successful movies
ever. And since no two of the big ones are being released head
to head, each of them could hit a home run." Notes producer
Laurence Mark: "Sequels aren't necessarily about a failure of
the Hollywood imagination. They're about lowering risks." So
why, in a business full of expensive risks, shouldn't Hollywood
be allowed just one near-sure thing?

    In a way, every movie, every work of fiction, is a sequel
-- the latest chapter in a book of stories as old as once upon
a time. The narrative conventions are age-old too: that man
defines his nature through action; that the path to wisdom winds
through false friends and moral booby traps; that maps lead to
buried treasure and X always marks the spot; that manly virtue
will be rewarded with a king's garlands and a kiss at the
fade-out. The Indy stories are just the most recent link in a
chain forged at the first campfire, when an elder spun tales to
keep the clan together and the demons at bay.

    Tale spinners Spielberg and Lucas (who devised the story
with Menno Meyjes) and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam were obviously
brimming to work variations on the nearly $700 million-grossing
theme. For openers, they toss teenage Indy (River Phoenix) into
a nest of cave robbers, a lion's den and a snake pit, thereby
explaining, with an economy that Feuillade and Freud might
admire, the origins of their hero's hat, his favorite weapon and
his fear of serpents. The movie's creators have not grown tired.
They keep the action cracking as smartly as Indy's bullwhip.

    "I've learned more about movie craft from making the
Indiana Jones films than I did from E.T. or Jaws," says
Spielberg, who won't take on Indy a fourth time. "And now I feel
as if I've graduated from the college of Cliff-Hanger U. I ought
to have paid tuition." Spielberg's camera style neither misses
a trick nor reveals how it's done. See how he cues the change
of a Zeppelin's course by the shadow scampering across a
cocktail glass; watch a motif of cigarette lighters carry
complicity from one character to another. Like a fine old
haunted castle, his film has secret staircases of suspense,
revolving panels of plot.

    Indy 3, like Raiders, features airplane stunts, a brawl on
a careering vehicle and a sacred quest: a search for the Holy
Grail, the cup Jesus used at the Last Supper. The film expands
the role of Denholm Elliott as a museum curator and tosses in
a cameo appearance by Adolf Hitler, who autographs Henry's Grail
diary. A new twist is Elsa (capable Alison Doody), a blond
sorceress poised between greed and glory. She is an Indy gone
wrong, and the series' first indispensable female.

    A vamp is standard baggage in the thriller genre,
especially in the Bond films, from which the Indy series took
some sideways inspiration. In 1977 Spielberg told Lucas he
wanted to make a James Bond movie. "I have something better than
James Bond," Lucas replied, and sketched the scenario for
Raiders. The Indy series bears traces of the Bond films in its
superhero with an edge of surliness, its globe-girdling
itineraries, its villains purring megalomania, its neat blend
of macho cynicism and schoolboy pluck. But The Last Crusade has
something better than James Bond. It has Sean Connery.

    Since he eighty-sixed 007 almost two decades ago (with one
aimless visit home in 1983 for Never Say Never Again), Connery
has mothballed his toupee and gained a twilight twinkle. He is
the movies' sexiest, most majestic older star. And yet at 58
Connery was thought too young to play Indy's father, who was
originally conceived as a crotchety gent like On Golden Pond's
Henry Fonda. It was Spielberg's idea to cast Connery, a decision
that illuminated the film and its filming. "When Sean and
Harrison arrived on the set," Spielberg recalls, "everyone got
quiet and respectful. The two are like royalty -- not the
royalty you fear because they can tax you, but the royalty you
love because they will make your lives better."

    Connery's arrival opened the script up to puckish
revisions, as when Henry reveals he has slept with Elsa, with
whom Indy has also dallied. At a "Huh?" of disbelief from Indy,
Henry preens defensively, protesting, "I'm as human as the next
man." Indy growls back, "I was the next man!" Would the Henry
Jones character, as originally conceived, have slept with Elsa?
"No," says Boam with impeccable movie logic, "but Sean Connery
would."

    "I wanted to play Henry Jones as a kind of Sir Richard
Burton," Connery says. "There was so much behind him and so many
hidden elements in his life." In the beginning Henry speaks to
his long-lost son slowly, with wide eyes and grand gestures, as
if Indy were a child in need of gentle remedial education. "I
was bound to have fun with the role of a gruff, Victorian
Scottish father," Connery says of Henry (remember, the Jones
family hails from Utah). "And have fun I did -- so much so that
I told Harrison, `If you give me all the jokes, you'll really
have to work for your scenes.'"

    Ford, 46, who is married to E.T. screenwriter Melissa
Mathison, is one of the world's richest actors. But he could
have told Connery he's no stranger to hard work: he supported
himself in lean times as a carpenter to the stars. He's had lean
dreams too. "George and Steven may be living out their childhood
fantasies on film," he says, "but I didn't come from the same
crate of oranges." Indeed not. "My first childhood ambition was
to be the guy who carried the coal from our house to the coal
chute in a wheelbarrow. I remember there was this big pile of
coal, and then he did his job, and then there was no coal. I
liked the rhythm of his work. It was a job you could see getting
done. My dad would come home from his job and talk about how
unhappy everyone was there. And compared to that, I'd rather
have shoveled coal. I was four or five."

    Ford is a man who holds few illusions about star quality.
Movie magic may be an aging prostitute under a harsh streetlight
for a kid whose grandfather played vaudeville in blackface and
whose father produced innovative TV commercials in Chicago. "One
day I met the actor who played Sky King, the aerial ace,"
recalls the actor. "He turned out to be short, heavyset and
unconventional looking. It intrigued me, how different show
business was from what people thought. And maybe that
disposition gave me a reality register that has been a fixture
in my life."

    Ford thinks the way Bogie talked, and he takes an
old-fashioned movie star's pleasure in the craft of filmmaking.
"I love to work," he says. "I like doing something difficult and
complicated. It's like setting yourself in a maze and learning
the maze so you always come out in the right place at the right
time. I'm a technical actor. For me, acting is part
intellectual, part mechanical. It's being in control of your
mind and body at the same time. The emotions you show may be
spontaneous, but the bricks have to be carefully laid to fit
with the other pieces. You don't fool around with the work."

    You don't fool around with Ford, or Indy. In the film's
prologue, young Jones is chased and chastened by a band of
scavengers. The gang's leader tells Indy, "You lost today, kid.
But that doesn't mean you have to like it." Real-life flashback:
when Ford was about young Indy's age, he entered a junior high
school where, he recalls, "the favorite recess activity was to
take me to the edge of a sharply sloping parking lot, throw me
off, wait for me to struggle back to the top, then throw me off
again. The entire school would gather to watch this display. I
don't know why they did it. Maybe because I wouldn't fight the
way they wanted me to fight. They wanted a fight they could win.
And my way of winning was just to hang in there." He refused to
be a sissy, so he would be Sisyphus.

    "Other people gave up," Ford says of his hard-won acting
eminence. "I don't give up. That's all." A good man to make a
movie with, if you're Lucas and Spielberg and Connery. A great
quartet of storytellers to watch riding off into the everlasting
sunset at the end of Indiana Jones' last and best crusade.


-- Elaine Dutka and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles and Jane
Walker/Madrid