TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/052989/05298900.065

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 12KB | 212 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