This Summer We’re Channelling: Indiana Jones and The Raiders of The Lost Ark at 40

Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. Paramount Pictures

Forty years ago this summer Indiana Jones took the world on his first and greatest adventure on screen in Raiders of the Lost Ark. To this day, the film imagined by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas has remained, for many, the quintessential adventure movie. An exercise in pure cinematic style, Raiders of the Lost Ark has every bit of action held together by an irresistible mixture of boyish spirit and a romance with classic cinema. Drawn from forgotten Saturday matinee serials of the 30s, comics, and Howard Hawks films, Steven Spielberg created the kind of adventure he would have loved as a kid. Throughout his career, Hawks, too, had wanted “to merge his fictional ideals with his real life, a boy’s fantasy being played out every day”, as Todd McCarthy analyses in his book, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, something he always sought for in his adventure films, from Only Angels Have Wings to Hatari!.

Harrison Ford and Paul Freeman in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, 1981. Paramount Pictures

“I never wanted to get away from the B-movie, pulp feeling of the entire cliff-hanger era of the 40s and 50s, the old Republic serials”, Spielberg told Vanity Fair in February 2008. “I think one of the things we brought to the genre – and we didn’t coin the genre, it’s been around a lot longer than we’ve been around – but what we brought to the genre was our willingness to let our leading man to get hurt, and to express his pain and to get his mad out and to take pratfalls and sometimes be the but of his own jokes.”

When he is not a tweed-wearing archeology professor, Harrison Ford is a leather-jacketed temple raider, scouring the globe for treasures and artifacts, like the Lost Ark of the Covenant, the gold chest in which Moses supposedly stored the stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Fearless and flawed, with a caustic spirit and dry humor and dressed in his trademark fedora, bullwhip and rumpled clothes, he is the less-than-perfect, unconventional hero with an Achilles heel for snakes, who can throw a punch but gets beaten up plenty in return, too, and who walks the fine line between the good side and the bad side. In fact, Indiana and his duplicitous French rival archeologist, Belloq (Paul Freeman), are rather “very much alike,” as the latter states. “Archeology is our religion, yet we have both fallen from the purer faith. Our methods have not differed as much as you pretend. I am a shadowy reflection of you. It would take only a nudge to make you like me, to push you out of the light.”

I think that’s one of the reasons why the film has continued to bond with viewers, making Indiana highly identifiable, reaching so many people, such a wide and diversified audience, crossing generational boundaries. “The fact that it just keeps on giving is wonderful”, actor Paul Freeman recently told Variety this June, the month of the film’s 40th anniversary. Dressed in tweed, Indiana Jones is certainly the personification of the good guy, but in his adventurer outfit, he is the tough guy who could very well be thief or law, in the true vein of the film noir’s great anti-heros, who walked that grey zone and were defined by the same dress – the fedora an intrinsic part of their image – and dialogue and varying degrees of vulnerability, regardless of whether they played detective or criminal.

The heroine, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), isn’t the archetypal girl-in-distress either. Strong-headed, high-spirited and capable of taking care of herself, as well as the custodian of a jewel essential for locating the ark, she is the kind of feisty leading lady action heroine Spielberg liked when he was watching movies growing up, especially the movies of the 30s, “when women held their own against men, when they could win the day, like Irene Dunn, Ann Sheridan, Barbara Stanwyk”, Spielberg explained. “And writers knew how to write for women in the 30s and 40s.” And if they were Howard Hawks, they refused to yield to the expected Hollywood sentimentality and mawkishness, too. There is a frisky chemistry between Marion and Indy, the kind we see in Hawks’ films – because he liked his characters, men and women, “to be ready to spark when the fuse was lit” and he liked to depict how “a new couple sparked until they clicked”, that incipient attraction, insouciant confidence, youthful desire. We don’t know much about Indiana Jones’ and Marion’s past romance, but it is clear it was not a long-term one, which allows it to spark and surprise and fuses the audience’s interest and anticipation.

Karen Allen in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, 1981. Paramount Pictures

All that being said, what is the one thing that comes to the collective mind when we think of the character Indiana Jones? His look. Because nothing can make a character feel more like himself or herself than the clothes they are wearing. And that’s how we first meet Indy. We see his silhouette from behind, shaped by the leather jacket and fedora hat on the backdrop of the blue sky and the great unknown of the South American jungle. It’s this look, and especially the hat, that we identify Indy with. In an interview for The Fedora Lounge, costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis encountered the research that went into the creation of Indiana’s costume. “Steven and I sat and watched a couple of movies together. We watched China, which is an Alan Ladd picture from the 1940s; we watched The Lost Treasure of the Incas, starring Charlton Heston as Harry Steele. It was made in 1952, and he [Heston] really wears the costume, more or less, of Indiana Jones. Then I watched The Greatest Show on Earth, in which Charlton Heston wears a brown leather jacket and a brown fedora, pretty much the costume of Indiana Jones. And if that wasn’t enough, Steven used to run Saturday morning adventure serials, where a lot of these guys, because it was just post-war, were wearing flight jackets and brown fedoras.”

Those flight jackets and fedoras bring to mind a favourite Howard Hawks film of mine, Only Angels Have Wings, having as characters men who are staring down death as they are flying dangerous missions over treacherous mountain terrain, come rain, shine or fog. The short landing strips are no less hazardous. It was a pioneering time, a time when the rules of aviation were just being learned. They have poor navigational equipment and makeshift planes, but they are hard-shelled and have an unconquerable spirit. It’s an electrifying, fast-paced, past-the-edge-of-yourself world, one of Howard Hawks’ fantasy worlds, a place for world-weary romanticism, borderline cynicism and crazy courage. They are united by their trust in each other, professionalism and a code of dressing. They all wear leather flight jackets. An aviator himself, Hawks sought to give his characters credibility, as tough guys and pilots, so he naturally turned to the flyer’s jacket, steeped in utility and far-from-perfect, hard-won heroism. Actually, I see a lot of Indiana Jones in Richard Barthelmess’ look in Only Angels, as seen in this piece I wrote about the film. He is wearing the perfect clothes for his mission. Perfect because he looks like himself and he looks real in his leather jacket and fedora. It’s like he’s always existed somewhere, not just on the written page of a script, and now he has made the acquaintance of the audience who has been long waiting for him.

Further elaborating on the costumes creation process, Nadoolman explained how Indy’s jacket, made of soft leather which she aged herself with sandpaper and a suede brush, had to be tight around the waist yet allow Harrison freedom of movement and of handling the whip, to have an athletic, masculine silhouette. As for the fedora, she had Harrison try on hundreds of grey, brown and black fedoras from Berman’s and Nathan’s in London (now Angel’s Costumiers), and she took the right crown height from one hat and the right brim width from another and made a bespoke fedora, one that has a life of its own.

“But we don’t create the icons, the audience creates the icons”, the costume designer concluded. “When you fell in love with Indiana Jones, I may have had a part in it, and Steven helped, but it’s the public that creates the image, it was the public that made him a hero.” But what they did do was to hold the visual reins and create a world that the audience did not know or only dreamed of and thrust them into it and into a feeling of adventure and fantasy.