The Definitives
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, River Phoenix, and Denholm Elliott
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 127 min.
by Brian Eggert
Entered into
The Definitives:
05/18/2008
Original Release Date:
05/24/1989
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade deviates from the full-fledged serial adventure formula followed by its predecessors. While keeping our basic escapist moviegoing desires soothed with breathtaking chases (using horses, cars, motorcycles, planes, tanks, and even a zeppelin) and exotic locales (from Venice to Berlin to Hatay), the film’s personality takes a lighter detour, especially when compared to the almost horror tone of its immediate forerunner Temple of Doom. Filled with constant laughs and surprising emotional pull thanks to the inclusion of Indiana Jones’ father, played by Sean Connery in a rare, almost entirely comic performance, the film’s thrills bear less weight. To whatever degree the actioner mood of the franchise quiets this third time around, the character depth increases ten fold, keeping our involvement equaled to previous entries, just on alternate planes of viewer connectivity.
Influential film critic Pauline Kael famously griped about the characterizations in Raiders of the Lost Ark, claiming they are nonexistent; she (unduly) called the entire production “impersonal”. But Harrison Ford’s archeologist treasure-protector is pointedly flawed, occasionally slapdash, and wholly embodied by the actor into a singular persona not requiring deep-rooted emotional or psychological explication. Indiana Jones is fixed in simplicity, making his presence effortless for the audience in lieu of the otherwise complicated special effects, villains, and plots he seeks to uncover in his adventures. Nevertheless, The Last Crusade could easily serve to appease the criticisms of Kael, since more so than the film’s MacGuffin (The Holy Grail), this third entry in the Indiana Jones series relies on expounding the emotional history and familial underpinnings of our hero.
Following the unwarranted misconception that they somehow failed or perhaps frightened their audience to uncomfortable extremes with Temple of Doom (despite earning $109 million at the box office, more than double its budget), director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas sought a homecoming to their original Raiders formula: Indy fighting Nazis while in search of a religious artifact—so successful because pre-established iconography inhabits the narrative. Lucas suggested the MacGuffin of The Holy Grail, serving up Indiana Jones as a modern-day knight of Arthurian proportions. What could be more heroic? The idea was initially rejected by Spielberg because he was reminded of Terry Gilliam’s comedy classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail (not that Gilliam’s knights ever came close to discovering the Grail). Spielberg had long desired an Indiana Jones adventure exploring two elements: a haunted castle and the rambunctious Monkey King from Chinese legend. Chris Columbus (who would later helm the first two Harry Potter films) was commissioned to write the screenplay; his yarn took place in Africa, used Spielberg’s dream MacGuffin of the Monkey King, and at one point featured Indy on top of a rhinoceros chasing bad guys. Needless to say they passed on Columbus’ scenario.
While Lucas developed his concepts for The Holy Grail device, he soon realized that Spielberg wanted more than a MacGuffin to guide his picture. He wanted an emotional growth for a character otherwise entrenched in his singularity—a dangerous concept, changing the nature of a character already proven a triumph. Aiming at general audience fare, the filmmakers agreed to humanize Indiana Jones further by mapping his family life, namely his father, initially envisioned as a cantankerous Walter Brennan patriarch. Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam was approached next and given only a few criteria: use of The Holy Grail, inclusion of more humor, and Indy’s father as a humanizing device. Boam’s script was accepted, however a number of the films most enjoyable sequences (the tank and motorcycle chases) were added afterward or altogether improvised. The result was another type of Indiana Jones film entirely, albeit reminiscent of Raiders, yet on its own as distinctive in pitch as each entry had managed thus far.
Each Indiana Jones film begins with an appetizer—the fundamental climax of Indy’s previous untold adventure, leading into the film’s central conflict. Boam begins The Last Crusade with a look at our hero at an early age, from where his appreciation for ancient artifacts, his attributed hat, whip as weapon of choice, fear of snakes, and Harrison Ford’s real life chin scar derive in the movies’ continuum. Playing young Indiana, River Phoenix embodies what we would imagine a youthful Harrison Ford to be—agile, attractive, idealistic, slightly haphazard, perhaps overly self-assured, yet always charming. The sequence plays out like a Boy Scout Western, with Phoenix’s comic Indy chased on horseback by hired raiders, then across the top of circus train cars, back home where his busy father waves-off his son’s impatience. Within Phoenix’s ten minutes of screen time, he embodies the character as singularly as Ford, and had his early death not occurred in 1993, he would have been the perfect choice to continue the franchise in Ford’s footsteps.
Many of the comic gags in The Last Crusade come, surprisingly, by way of Sean Connery’s fight to strengthen his character from crotchety old man to bumbling bookworm professor. His condition to join the picture depended on his character’s sameness to Indiana Jones: Jones Sr. has already bedded Indy’s guide Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody) and found the Grail’s location, only he has done so without his son’s adventurous spirit to spring him out of trouble, hence his capture by Nazi goons. Much to Connery’s pleasure and ours, Spielberg had no intention of exploiting a “James Bond meets Indiana Jones” gimmick with his casting. Quite the opposite—Connery’s performance is a total reversal from his suave onscreen super-spy personality, offering up an unexpected comic gem.
But these humorous moments are never superfluous, unlike typical genre comic relief; rather they add depth to the dynamic between Indy and his father. Watch the motorcycle chase where Indy runs down Nazi pursuers with Jones Sr. in the sidecar. Our hero sends one Nazi spinning into the air, and then smiles to his father for approval, who simply frowns in dissatisfaction toward such violence. Through their interaction, we identify the boyish and romantic reality of Indy’s existence hunting treasure and fighting villains and getting the girl, while his father represents a buzz-killing adult. This distinction takes us back to the series’ origins, wherein those willing to embrace their Inner Child best relate to material so grounded in Saturday matinee serials; and so, who better to star in a serial emblematization than Indiana Jones, an adolescent sort who embraces his Inner Child (and ours) with every new adventure. The presence of his father weakens the manly swashbuckler aspect of Indiana Jones, humanizing him, and in turn reducing the character to a child. Perhaps Indy’s adventures are rebellion for an unfulfilling relationship with his dad, inciting the name change from Henry Jr. to Indiana “after the dog.” Perhaps Indy has not become a full-fledged adult until his reconciliation with his father in this film.
The growth of this subplot was spearheaded by Spielberg, who throughout his career has explored father-son relationships reflective of his own broken rapport from childhood. Moving with his father, Arnold, from Arizona to California after his parents divorced, Spielberg found his upbringing lonely and rough, his father’s presence remote, leaving him ostensibly abandoned to focus on his obsession with cinema. Pursuing his dreams with unparalleled determination—motivated in part by his rumored Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism—Spielberg made it without support of his father, earning himself a seven-year contract with Universal Studios by the time he was 22. Time and again viewers see his films shot from the child’s point of view, both technically (with low angles) and thematically.
Circumstances comparable to the lacking connection between Spielberg and his father arise in nearly all his films to a tragic degree: The family in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is downtrodden by the conspicuous lack of a father figure; Empire of the Sun features a young Christian Bale left by his family to fend for himself in when Japan invades China in 1937; Hook features a grown up Peter Pan oblivious to his children, but then becoming childlike himself; the children lost in Jurassic Park look to a reluctant and uninterested Alan Grant (Sam Neill) for fatherly protection; A.I. Artificial Intelligence considers a robot boy desperate for parental love, yet unable to genuinely find or express such emotions; Catch Me if You Can depicts Frank Abagnale Jr’s dad as an irresponsible swindler who advocates his son’s con artist ways, while Jr. searches for a sturdy father figure even in the FBI agent chasing him; Minority Report takes the father’s point of view, as Tom Cruise’s character has lost his son and lives with the regret. Several other cases within Spielberg’s filmography show the director’s personal feelings influencing the story to meet his reflective emotional concerns; the above are simply the most clear-cut instances.
Rarely does Spielberg allow for a ceasefire between father and son, leaving his narratives curiously cynical toward the prospect of reunion and resolution amid his signature sentimentality. And yet, The Last Crusade perfectly accomplishes this task without effort, by symbolizing a sought after truth in the historical and mythical journey to find proof of Jesus Christ via The Holy Grail. Through Jesus’ cup from The Last Supper, reconciliation is achieved between Christ and his Apostles, Christ and his own humanity, Christ and God, and finally Christ and the Crusader searching to find this fabled relic. Within the film, the cup subsumes those designations and strengthens them, providing magnitude to and profound allegory for the one adventure to be shared by Indiana Jones and his father. That Indy sees the Grail as a device to save his father in the end, as opposed to an important artifact, and furthermore allows it to drop back out of human reach, illustrates the film’s theme of family over objectivity. The MacGuffin becomes more than an artifice as The Ark of the Covenant and the Sankara Stones were in the previous Indiana Jones films; instead, it denotes an all-encompassing device that signifies our hero’s emotional journey as well as his literal one.
When closure on this final mission arrives, Indy has earned an appreciation for his father, closing out the character arc for the film, and seemingly so for the series—though no such existential bow bends throughout the first three films, connecting the narratives, rather they remain individual chapters. Indy’s look of admiration when Jones Sr. takes down an airplane with a flock of birds, his realization that his father’s quest for the Grail—which Indy believed hopeless—was indeed his own, and his desperate actions to save his father’s life… These events bring closure, if not peace to the character. And though heavily publicized as the final Indiana Jones film thanks to comments from both Lucas and Spielberg around the picture’s release in 1989, The Last Crusade is not necessarily the last crusade. Ford took a cue from his costar’s history as time and time again James Bond, admitting to he would “never say never” to another sequel.
If Raiders of the Lost Ark remains the series’ flawlessly balanced cinematic spectacle, and Temple of Doom provides an ultra-simplification of actionized suspense entertainment, then The Last Crusade places a relevant humanity onto the lot. Whatever characterizations are lacking in the previous films, if any, they become fleshed-out in this entry, making repeat viewings of the trilogy all the more effectual. Spielberg’s most involved, personal admission into this franchise, this film suggests a possible end to the adventures of Indiana Jones by unearthing mysteries within our hero, seemingly entombed, yet at once exposed, present a multitude of opportunity for the character’s newly formed self-understanding to be tested.