Steven Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

In defense of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, there is at least some kind of push to make the movie distinct from its predecessors. Where the first three films paid homage to serials of the ‘30s and ‘40s, Crystal Skull accounts for the 19-year gap between between this fourth installment in the franchise and 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade by shifting its inspirations accordingly.

Here, the root inspiration is ‘50s-era science fiction (and its attendant Cold War subtext), which, in a way, makes the film unique, at least in relation to the other Indy movies. Instead of relics with supernatural might, the treasured objects of the film’s title are mysterious, perfectly formed skulls with strange powers, powers not of brute strength but of mental manipulation. In keeping with anti-Communist paranoia, the weapon here is the power to brainwash without fail. It’s a clever twist that didn’t get enough credit upon the film’s initial release; the only critic I can recall even mentioning it was, of all people, routine Spielberg-basher Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Steven Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

After the garish, overly frenetic and borderline offensive Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg tried to make amends by producing what was quite possibly his best film to that point, Empire of the Sun. When that also failed to light audiences on fire, Spielberg returned to his adventure franchise to win back the crowd. Given how simple Last Crusade turned out, it's amazing to think that initial ideas, even drafts of the film involved haunted mansions and Scottish ghosts. At last, Spielberg acquiesced to George Lucas' proposal, to have Indy search for the Holy Grail. Oh, and sprinkle in some Nazis while you're at it. There's a good lad.

Of the four Indiana Jones films, Last Crusade may the most inane but also the best embodiment of the escapism the series sought to repackage. Raiders is such a masterpiece that you spend as much time breaking down each immaculate shot as reveling in the overall effect, but Last Crusade is sloppy enough to make it more relatable even as it injects Spielberg's usual themes into a franchise that previously existed to honor the serials of Spielberg and Lucas' youth.

The opening segment, a flashback to Indiana's youth, finds him as a Boy Scout riding horses in Utah. He and a friend stumble upon grave robbers uncovering the Cross of Coronado, causing Indy to swoop in and grab the artifact to place in a museum. After a lengthy chase that involves, for whatever reason, a train carrying circus animals (and some piss-poor animatronics, truth be told), Indy makes his way home, only to be shushed by his father, who wants to hear nothing of his son's adventures. The sheriff comes by and reveals himself to be bought by the thieves, and the head robber, dressed as Indy later will, expresses his admiration for the kid and even gives the boy his fedora. We never see the father, but we get plenty of looks at this man dressed the way our hero will later pattern his iconic outfit. In an instant, Spielberg moves from the silliest moment in any of the Indiana Jones films thus far -- though I am invoking the "chilled monkey brains" exemption -- to something that recalls his more serious aims as a filmmaker, and the sudden move from wide, John Ford-esque vistas and moving shots to static, cramped, uncomfortable moments inside the Jones household communicates how much freer Indy feels when anywhere away from his father.

Back in the present, Indiana, long estranged from his dad, returns to university after finally reclaiming that artifact that got the giant stone ball rolling in Indy's life. As usual, he can barely get through a class before getting the itch to go back in the field, and the verdant, tranquil grounds of the college look odder and more out of place behind Jones than the matte paintings and composite backgrounds that frame Indy's typical actions. So, when an old colleague, Donovan (Julian Glover), stops by to assign Jones a new task, he jumps at the chance. Even better, it concerns the artifact his father devoted his entire life to: the Holy Grail.

A spiritual line runs through all of the Indiana Jones movies, Last Crusade is the first to take anything seriously. Raiders of the Lost Ark only got down to the nitty-gritty of Jewish theology when it directly concerned the ark; everything else focused on the traps of ancient civilizations. Temple of Doom made a fun house roller-coaster of Eastern spirituality, recreating the racist caricature of old serials without ever commenting on it. Yet Christian imagery dominates Last Crusade, from giant stained-glass windows containing clues to specific religious instructions for avoiding booby-traps. Even the father-son dynamic, a conflict between a seemingly all-knowing father and the son who devotes his life to pleasing him, has a Christian undertone.

That Spielberg should take a more serious tack is amusing when you consider that Last Crusade is, by a long shot, the most comedic and lightweight of the four Jones movies. Even the slapstick of Temple had a veneer of dark horror to it, but Last Crusade works best as a comedy on a grand scale, effectively returning to 1941 and finally figuring out how to balance pratfalls with Spielberg's epic canvas. This is only more true when we are finally confronted with Henry Jones, none other than Sean Connery. The mismatch between Ford and Connery, only 12 years older than the actor playing his son (and, more importantly, Scottish), is inherently comedic. But Connery himself appears to have signed on for a comedy, all goofy faces and dry one-liners. The hackneyed dialogue that makes the early parts of film stilted suddenly gives way to an unlikely double act that livens up the proceedings immensely.

Compare the gallows humor of the German being sliced by an airplane propeller in Raiders to the farce of Henry shooting down the plane he and Indy are flying by tearing up the tail. The catacomb crawling with rats just isn't as terrifying as a floor covered in serpents, and the creepy-crawlie sequence here comes with its own punchline when Indy and his latest lover, Dr. Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody), emerge in the middle of a Venetian café. Perhaps the funniest aspect of the film is how befuddled and clumsy Henry is; you begin to question why Indy feels the need to prove himself to this dolt, until the son makes his own slip-ups. When the two are first reunited, Henry beams that his son picked up his research and successfully hid the diary containing all his Grail research from Nazi capture, only to learn immediately that his son brought that diary all the way back to the lion's den. "I should have sent it to the Marx brothers!" Henry spits. Besides, the fact that they both slept with Elsa makes for a surprisingly complex take on Spielberg's usual father-son relationships. I mean, you don't see that in E.T.

The action sequences are not as impressive, nor as numerous, as I remember, as if Spielberg intended it to be a comedy all along. A chase involving a tank is more funny than suspenseful, and the final challenge tests Jones' intellect over his ability. And yet, the film never flags, kept alive by its silliness and genuinely engaging performances from both Ford and Connery, actors not normally known for comedic timing. The Scottish accent Ford puts on in a hilariously misguided attempt to dupe a castle servant slays me, and I love that he can beat up a blimp usher five inches shorter than him, steal his clothes and emerge with a perfectly fitted outfit. It's also nice to see Spielberg questioning just what happens to Indy's archaeology class in his absence, as students swarm his office when he returns begging for their long-overdue midterm grades. Even the young women who fawn over him would rather get their essays back than spend a lovely evening with the good doctor.

The climax is grandiose enough to appeal to everyone but takes the material serious enough to give the franchise an emotional stake for the first time. Wounding Henry gives Indy a concrete reason to go after the grail where previous films have relied solely on Indy wanting an artifact to have it -- Temple, with its subplot of enslaved children, was too murky to effectively create tension. Spielberg ingeniously shoots the immortal knight deep within the cave that holds the cup in ghostly white that clashes with the golden hues of the burning fires and light reflecting off the ostentatious adornments surrounding the true Cup of Christ as decoys, communicating the dark side of eternal life in an instant.

The most significant development in the film, however, is the introduction of a more positive side to Spielberg's usual theme of absent fathers. For the first time, the director opens the possibility to reconciliation. Roy Neary left his family behind to go to space. Elliott's dad remained removed. James finds his way back to his family, but he's too scarred by life in an internment camp to ever readjust. Here, Spielberg slowly comes around: maybe a distant father and a son can reconcile, but so far this can only happen far down the road, after a rotten childhood is set aside. It would be a few years yet before the director would let a child forgive his father.

Steven Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Steven Spielberg had already plundered his own work as much as his influences by the time he made his first sequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Jaws not only served to transport the entire plot of Duel into the ocean but took the sound cue of the "dying" truck for the shark; E.T. reworked Close Encounters of the Third Kind from a child's perspective. That Temple of Doom should bear a resemblance to the director's past work is naturally obvious, but the most visible reference may not be the one you think.

The first scene, the film's most suspenseful and most successfully comedic, takes place in a Shanghai nightclub that looks suspiciously like the raucous party sequence from 1941 (itself vaguely reminiscent of the centerpiece of Tati's Playtime). As with Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple opens with a double cross, as everyone's favorite adventurer/tenure-draining absentee professor delivers the ashes of a Chinese emperor to a client who swindles Jones out of his payment of a large diamond by poisoning his drink and offering the antidote in lieu of payment. The constant use of the Lazy Susan rotating objects around the table and the quick cuts of weapons being readied by the gangsters ratchets up suspense, while the ultimate explosion of the situation plays out in the sort of grandiose comedy Spielberg failed to capture with the film this sequence recalls.

However, even the set pieces subtly lay out the difference between Raiders and its successor. Raiders's first big special effect was a giant rolling boulder that chases the protagonist and nearly crushes him; in Temple, Jones hides behind an equally outsized gong that rolls along the floor blocking our hero from Thompson machine gunfire. It's funny, but it underlines the split in sophistication: the boulder, a three-dimensional object, threatened its hero, while the gong, a 2-D disc exists not behind the protagonist pushing him but beside him where it is no threat. I doubt anyone believed that Indy would have died in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but suspense is a necessity in the booby trap-laden adventure realm, and Temple of Doom -- all of the Indy sequels, really -- never capture the thrills of the original because of scenarios like this, ones that place the hero just to the side of danger so he can more easily quip at its expense rather than in a situation where he might truly be tested.

Indeed, with a sequence placed just after this opening involving surviving a jump from a plane without a parachute by inflating a raft in midair and another depicting a cheesy (but, in fairness, occasionally riveting) mine cart chase, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom exaggerates the already cartoony elements of the Saturday morning serials Spielberg watched and loved as a child into outright farce. This is of course intentional, as no one with the director's storytelling ability could have worked very far into production without seeing this movie taking shape as a cartoon, but Temple of Doom's chief shortcoming is the feeling it exudes of wanting to be a more postmodern take on the material. Replacing the suspense of the first film are images and objects of full-on horror that clash with its sillier moments; had Spielberg and Harrison Ford pushed Indy just a bit further in the aloof, separated direction the character moved for this film, our hero might have provided a more ironic counterpoint for the outlandish ethnocentrism on display. Instead, he looks bemused (sometimes amusingly so) as he stands in the middle of an idiotic display, the sane man locked in the madhouse.

After all, both of his companions are buffoons. One is Willie (Kate Capshaw), a famous American singer performing for some reason (a reason I don't care to know in this intentionally goofy movie) in that Shanghai nightclub on a long-term basis who not so much joins Indy on his quest as constantly drags him down like a manicured, pampered albatross that rises from the dead to peck and squawk at Indy's neck. Spielberg wanted the complete opposite of Marion Ravenwood, who was competent and strong (until the actual story kicked in and she became a damsel, at least), so Willie is nightmarishly stupid and entitled compared to the abrasive and compelling love interest that preceded her. Willie serves only to act like a bimbo in every situation, and her presence begins to grate before she's even finished delivering her first lines. Jones' other pal is Short Round who, much to my consternation, is a child. Worse, he is a child designed solely to be a wisecracking young cad, in the model that is not funny, has never been funny nor shall ever be funny. (The two exceptions to this rule, in the entirety of cinema, are Jackie Coogan in The Kid and Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon. That's an average of one per half-century.) Short Round is the second most clever character in the film, which says more about the too-broad brushstrokes with which screenwriters Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz and Spielberg's buddy George Lucas paint the people than the believability of Jonathan Ke Quan's performance, which had no hope of being anything other than a groanworthy spectacle thanks to the material he's given.

Technically a prequel -- only in a temporal sense, not a narrative one -- Temple of Doom places the hero and his team in India, or a version of it. There is no grounding of reality for this depiction of the second most populous country in the world, and Spielberg's research appears to have gone no further than watching Michael Powell films. The obvious connection is, of course, Black Narcissus, what with a British captain (himself looking more than a little like Roger Livesey in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) presiding over the lavish Pankot Palace, a cloistered abode where the only wealth of the nation lies and colors the occupiers' view of a country they do not truly understand -- to use modern parlance, they never leave the 'green zone.' But there is even a hint of The Tales of Hoffmann in here, as the two unlikely partners share a common goddess, Kali, the dancing death deity personified in one of Hoffmann's vignettes and the subject of brutal cult worship in the bowels of the Indian palace here. In fact, both uses of Kali are blatantly sexual, from the lithe dancing in Powell's film to the penetrative, literally heart-grabbing ritual conducted above a swirling lava pit.

The difference is that Powell, a lifelong and unapologetic Tory, painted his dramatization of India in Black Narcissus as an attack on itself, its own stereotypes proof that the British did not fully understand the nation they nevertheless subjugated and forced its own culture upon. Meanwhile, Spielberg who, for all the love he has received from everyone for making WWII en vogue again, is the image of the "Jew-run, leftist media" that fundamentalist Christians use to scare their children into eating vegetables and agreeing to homeschooling, creates this broadly offensive pastiche of cheap stereotypes born of older movies. This is not to say that Spielberg is deliberately putting forward a racist view -- for all of the offense of scenes like the warped dinner party with eyeball soup and "chilled monkey brains," such moments are too dumb to really get under the skin -- but that he cared more for feeling like a kid again than telling an interesting, suspenseful and witty story, as he did with the first film, which frankly has its own racial issues that I feel are also valid, if overstated. (It's interesting to note, however, that, for all the deliberate use of old-school effects like matte paintings and sound-stage over location shooting, some of Spielberg and George Lucas' trickery was the result of being refused the right to film in India because the government found the script racist.)

The overriding conclusion to take away from Temple of Doom is not only that Spielberg should have stuck to his own mantra of not making sequels for his work but also that he clearly did not fully learn his lesson from 1941, a more ambitious picture that nevertheless revealed how blaring comedy at deafening decibels was just a technological way of fatally overselling the joke. Temple of Doom has damn better effects than those found in 1941, but those effects create an odd split between the darkness of the mise-en-scène and the goofy meaninglessness of how that mise-en-scène is ultimately conveyed. Spielberg is still talented at choreographing jokes visually, such as Willie screaming to an Indy she doesn't realize is fighting for his life that, "This is the night you let me slip through your fingers" only to cut to an obvious but cheeky shot of Indy reaching in vain for the door to get her help. But he still cannot place dialogue longer than the briefest quips into his films without drowning them in the grandiose style of his direction. Besides, many of his sight gags are just too broad, such as Willie struggling to get on an elephant while a gaggle of village women look on, mouths agape as if amazed they allowed themselves to be cinematically represented in such a way.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom has its moments, and it definitely succeeds in its unspoken goal, which is to establish the hero as the new James Bond (Bond even took directly from the film's scene of a bad guy being sucked into and crushed by giant rollers in not one but two of its films, via a cocaine-chopping processor in License to Kill and a printing press in Tomorrow Never Dies). Bond films work because their protagonist regards the ludicrous inflation of gadgetry and stunts with detachment, as if every situation, no matter how fundamentally insane or even stupid, is just part of a day's work. Indy takes on that detachment, but in the process he loses the natural, rakish glee of watching him in the moment, replaced by the forced wit of a character smarter than the world around him but not quite bright enough to burst through the film's metaphysics to watch it with us. Furthermore, Spielberg never finds the balance between the more horrific and explicit side of the material, which would prompt the MPAA to create the PG-13 rating as a stopgap between PG and R, and its frothy, lightweight humor, a failure that even the director himself acknowledged. In a making-of documentary, Spielberg contended that Temple of Doom was easily his least favorite of the trilogy (back when it was just a trilogy) because it lacked the personal touch he'd placed in his other work. That's the most astute criticism anyone could offer; Spielberg established himself as a mogul almost instantly in Hollywood because his supremely commercial projects, themselves an anomaly, contained the stamp of auterial themes and personality characteristic of his contemporaries' less bombastic work. Temple of Doom does not contain a stamp or a spark or any other quantity of emotional investment, lacking even a fondness for character the bubbled under the plot conventions of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a running spring that keeps that movie fresh today. The director believes that the best, perhaps the only truly worthwhile thing to come out of the film was his marriage to Capshaw, which is both schmaltzy and completely true.

The failure of 1941 was intriguing for what it could have been, and the occasional overload of saccharin in The Sugarland Express came from an honest place that absolved it, but with the soulless craft on display here, Spielberg at last made his first truly bad film, interspersed with moments of entertainment but bogged down by a lack of personal purpose to a director who certainly didn't need to take on the project for cash. Besides his eventual betrothal, perhaps the most positive outcome of the film was its director's own dissatisfaction with it, one that would spark his first attempt to marry his big sights, big feelings style to a story of true severity, beyond inserting something as ponderous as child slavery in this daffy cartoon, and would set Spielberg along the path to his next major career shift. But more on that another time.

Steven Spielberg: Raiders of the Lost Ark

How Steven Spielberg and George Lucas ever got Raiders of the Lost Ark is as impressive a feat as the finished product. Made on the heels of the director's first box office disappointment, Raiders compounded its risky prospects with its very premise. Released one year after Heaven's Gate put the kibosh on New Hollywood, the thought of another historical epic coming out so soon after Cimino's effort tanked must have put Paramount on edge.

Spielberg avoided falling into the same trap that ensnared Cimino, though, through some key differences. One, Raiders of the Lost Ark, unlike Heaven's Gate, does not strive for historical veracity, as it pays tribute to the old adventure serials that Spielberg and Lucas enjoyed in their childhood. Two, the fact that the film draws from those serials gave the film more commercial prospects than the more dramatic Gate. Three, and this is most important, Spielberg still had 1941 weighing on him.

The two friends spent years working on script revisions and storyboards, so when Paramount finally greenlit the film Spielberg didn't spend time (or money) wracking his brain over the story or how it should be told. Despite the film's grandeur and multiple location shoots, Spielberg started and stopped principal photography in only 73 days. He shot as few takes as possible and rewrote planned action sequences into shorter, wittier bursts -- thank Harrison Ford's dysentery for possibly the most memorable moment in the film, when a sword brandishing warrior challenges Indiana Jones, who simply draws his gun and shoots him, bypassing a planned fight sequence. He kept costs low and avoided the sort of indulgence that sank other big pictures. "Had I had more time and money," Spielberg said later, "it would have turned out a pretentious movie."

Raiders of the Lost Ark is as much a passion project as any of the other latter-day accomplishments of New Hollywood, drawn from the inspirations of its auteurs' youths and mounted on a scale that would previously been afforded to only the most proven masters. It also cements, for better and worse, Spielberg and Lucas' "takeover" of the box office, begun with Spielberg's double-whammy of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Lucas' first two Star Wars pictures. If I keep comparing Raiders to Heaven's Gate, it is because they, taken in tandem, show the handoff from one era to the next. Like guards at a border crossing, they separate the boundaries and reflect some of their cultural traits despite being right next to each other.

For Raiders has the same scale as Cimino's film, yet Spielberg uses it to different effect. This is, at heart, nothing more than a crowd pleaser. Indiana Jones wanders through epic expanses, but he is not Lawrence of Arabia, nor Colonel Blimp; he's just a man charismatic and magnetic as he may be, and Spielberg cares not for who he is but what he does. Note that we meet him in the midst of an escapade, out in the jungle where he navigates booby traps in a temple to reach a golden statue, which unleashes a boulder that nearly crushes him. Only after this sequence finishes do we learn anything about our Dr. Jones, and even then we glean scarely more than the knowledge that he is maybe the worst professor a university could hire, showing up to teach a class only when he feels the need to recharge the sexual fantasies of his female students.

The dialogue is ludicrous, the effects -- incredible as they are -- designed to remind us of their cartoony artificiality. No one could accuse Harrison Ford of being too dynamic and actor, and his primary moods as Jones waver between frustrated and just plain angry. Karen Allen brings pluck and fire to the role of Marion Ravenwood, yet her spark is snuffed in favor of turning her into the typical damsel in distress. Everything has been modulated to resemble the old serials, down to acting styles and scripting. Raiders has one advantage over its influences, though: Steven Spielberg never directed those old serials.

Dubious politics and stilted acting aside, Raiders of the Lost Ark is so masterfully constructed that it effectively parlays a forgotten genre of filmmaking, warts 'n' all, into a fresh genre that renewed interest in the adventure film even as it set such a high standard that filmmakers did not begin to approach its achievement until computers allowed them to recreate much of the size of it for less money and effort. Even in a purely expositional scene such as that early stint back at the university, Raiders never sags, propelled by one of John Williams' better scores (buoyed, of course, by one of his most recognizable themes) and the sort of sure hand that the director didn't show on his previous feature but did everywhere else. Had anyone else been at the helm of this material, including George Lucas, Raiders would likely have been one of those films that comes with the immediate qualifier "for it's time." Oh, the film was OK, for it's time; the effects were well done, for it's time.

Every year, at least one filmmaker or writer or actor (or some combination thereof) will defend a film he or she made as dumb fun, as if making something stupid and dispensable is an actual achievement. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a dumb movie, but it is ingeniously mounted, and thus it lives on as mindless fun for generations. Its serializes structure lends itself to bigger setpieces: Indy can run from a perfectly spherical boulder in the first ten minutes before jetting off to Nepal to fight some Nazis before rummaging through Cairo to find clues leading to the titular Ark of the Covenant.

Even with the director's attempts to cut economic corners with fewer takes, Raiders never feels slapdash. As this fantastic article by J.R. Hudson points out, every shot, even the calmer ones, is meticulously planned, enhancing the thrill of the stunts and maintaining interest in the dialogue scenes. When Indy must do battle with a great brute of a Nazi at an airfield out at the archaeological site, Spielberg cuts to shots of spilled fuel gushing toward flames that will lead back to the plane that Marion cannot escape. When the gas finally catches, though, Spielberg frames it in the background, racing at the plane as we take in the entire situation: the lit fuel, the spinning plane, and the fight between Indy and the thug. When the big Nazi bites it, chopped up by the plane's propeller, Spielberg conveys his demise through a red spray across the emblazoned swastika on the plane's tail.

With all the Nazi caricatures, most notably Ronald Lacey's scenery-chewing Gestapo interrogator Maj. Toht, it's easy to forget what a compelling character Indiana's true foil, René Belloq (Paul Freeman) is. A French archaeologist who competes with Jones for every find and allies with the Nazis because they will fund his expeditions, Belloq is memorable precisely because of his proximity to Jones: they both seek the same treasures, look as out of place among the natives they hire (or exploit, and the lines separating the two are not so clear), and even pine for the same woman. Belloq addresses this, saying, "You and I are very much alike...I am but a shadowy reflection of you. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. To push you out of the light." Compare this honesty to, say, Avatar, which positions the scientists who sympathize with the Na'vi as beacons of ethics when they're just as responsible for the rape of Pandora as the corporation that mines it. It's a fleeting moment of understanding, of the character of Indiana Jones and the entire genre he represents, that speaks to the intelligence Spielberg brings to the project even in his boyish enthusiasm. Too, Belloq's character would stand out even more had Spielberg's idea for Indy's characterization, an alcoholic à la Humphrey Bogart's character in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, panned out, as Belloq in many ways plays like a funhouse mirror perversion of Claude Rains' character in Casablanca.

Raiders of the Lost Ark ends with just about the best over-the-top ending ever committed to celluloid: I may be pissing away what little credibility I've stockpiled recently among some other writers in the online community, but God damn it, you show me a film that melts a Nazi's face and I'll show you a film that just sold a ticket. It is so dizzyingly absurd, so top to bottom (and back up again) ludicrous that it has no business whatsoever in a director's "comeback" feature, and yet there it is, a sticky puddle of fleshy sludge that probably congealed into a stiff middle finger just below the frame. Raiders is a grand simplification, of history, of character and of entire races and nationalities, which makes its own iconic status in Hollywood's timeline so amusing and fitting. Released in 1981, it precedes the explosion of action features it indirectly inspired and adventure epics that were practically remakes given how heavily other directors and screenwriters mined Spielberg's opus. Yet it's superior to all of them, anchored by a directing capability that far exceeded the talents of the copycats and given just enough self-awareness to gently poke at its own artifice and contradictions without getting too postmodern about it (which would make a great film on its own terms but would stick out like a sore thumb here). It's easy to forget how staggering the effects on this film are, living as we are in the wake of Peter Jackson conjuring armies and battles through computers, but one need only pop in a DVD of Indiana Jones' first, and by many leagues best, film and marvel at how brilliant "dumb fun" used to be.

Apocalypse Now

The real stars of Francis Ford Coppola's troubled epic are not Martin Sheen or Marlon Brando. They're not even Coppola or writer John Milius. No, the real people behind the success of the film are cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and sound editor Walter Murch. Murch's fluid, deeply troubling sounds pervade the film, bleeding into one another seamlessly. Indeed, he grabs you in the first shot, when the sounds of helicopter rotors fade into the dull hum of a spinning fan. For the rest of the film, he skillfully combines Carmine's haunting, ethereal score with diegetic sound, to the point that you can't trust your own ears, much less the hell that unfolds on-screen.

If war is hell, then Apocalypse Now is as much an adaptation of Dante's Inferno as it is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Some may complain about its disjointed nature, particularly in the final chapter in Kurtz's compound, but Coppola isn't out to give us a simple story. He doesn't even want to make a film about the effects of war. No, Apocalypse Now is a film about the deepest, darkest levels of human conditioning, the kind we've spent our thousands of years on this Earth attempting to outgrow.

"Saigon. Shit, I'm still in Saigon," Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) growls in the first lines of the film. He signed up for a second tour and wants to head back into the jungle, but not for the clichéd gung-ho reasons. He's been back home, but Vietnam so changed him that he could not re-assimilate into society. His restlessness leads him to get high and destroy his hotel room, eventually cutting his hand on glass and smearing himself in the blood. In the very first scene, the notion of the poster boy multiple-enlistee has been viciously perverted, shown to be the victim of war, not the ideal man who stands above it.

He eventually gets a new mission, classified like all his others. A general invites him to lunch and assigns him the task of assassinating decorated colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who disappeared into the jungle after accusations of murder and built his own empire of natives to take the fight to the North Vietnamese without the setback of arbitrary rules of engagement.

Willard heads upriver to Cambodia in a PBR with a motley crew consisting of the surly Chief (Albert Hall), tripped-out surfer Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms), New Orleans saucier "Chef" (Frederic Forrest) and 17-year-old "Mr. Clean (Laurence Fishburne). Apart from Chief, these sailors are all just kids, all spit and vinegar, ready to take on Charlie anytime, anywhere.

Their picaresque adventures through Vietnam are by turns horrific, absurd, hysterical and deeply, deeply unsettling. The film's centerpiece, an Air Cavalry assault on a NVA-controlled village, is as terrible as it is exhilarating. Led by the certifiably insane Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall, in a show-stealing performance), the sequence, famously set to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," must be the largest set piece ever constructed. Now, CGI fills the screen, and entire wars can be waged in a single scene, but the sense of placement, of meticulously construction, camera set-ups, and stunt co-ordinations required for this one 10 minute stretch demonstrate the true craft of filmmaking.

And Kilgore is more interesting than any of it. With a handful of lines, Duvall crafts the craziest SOB you'll ever see. Shells fall all around him and he doesn't flinch, and only when they come within inches does he react, and then only with annoyance. When Willard's boat runs into an operation already in clean-up, the captain can't get the colonel to pay attention long enough to relay orders from COMSAC, but the Kilgore perks up when he learns that Lance, his surfer idol, is among them. With only a small hunk of screen time, Duvall gets two of the three most memorable lines in the film: the hysterical call to arms "Charlie don't surf!" and the insane, poetic rant that starts with, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." As he commands his soldiers to break out their surfboards to ride waves that are still under fire, as mortar shells burst around him, he says with sadness in his voice, "This war's gonna end someday." We look on bewildered, but Willard knows the truth, that life will never be the same for any of them.

Elsewhere, Willard and Chef take a stroll through the woods looking for mangoes, only to be ambushed by a tiger. In the middle of the river, the USO erects a garish stage to host a couple of Playboy bunnies, and it appears to double as a thriving black market. The bunnies so rile the cheering men that some storm the stage and attempt to possibly rape the women, who run back to their helicopter and depart. In the scene that ensures that no member of the audience can mistake the movie for some fun epic (many point to the Valkyries scene as exciting over horrific), Chief orders a Vietnamese boat stop for boarding, and confusion leads to accidental massacre of all aboard, shattering the young boys and forever turning the Chief against Willard.

Storaro manages to make each segment look entirely different without losing visual flow. The reason so many of us love that Air Cavalry scene is that it's filmed from the POV of the soldiers. One must step outside of the film for a moment to look at it objectively to see how terrible it all really is. That scene with the tiger is funny in retrospect, but Storaro makes the lead-up as frightening as anything in a proper horror film. My personal favorite piece of the film, the Do Lung sequence, strikes me as being shot from the perspective of Lance, who drops acid shortly before the boat pulls up to this nightmare. As a result, light flows in and out, as flares arc over the trees, momentarily blinding before all is plunged back into darkness. Willard searches for the commanding officer, finally asking one of the entrenched soldiers, "Who's in charge here?" to which the manic kid replies, "Ain't you?"

Storaro's cinematography at Kurtz's compound alone earned him his Oscar: Marlon Brando got the job after convincing Coppola that he'd read Heart of Darkness, only to show up having read neither the script nor the book, as well as 40kg overweight. Already guaranteed $1 million even if fired, Brando created a dilemma for the director, which Storaro fixed by covering Kurtz in shadow. The night shots of the compound are bathed with a jaundiced yellow, reflecting the sickness and "slow death" of the camp and its leader. Shadow, in cinema, naturally reflects the moral complexity of a character, but Kurtz and even Willard are so enshrouded in these scenes that they're practically invisible. Willard remarks in his narrations throughout the film that the colonel's methods actually display a brilliance and ingenuity, and he's certainly got a number of deaths on his conscience, and he does not yet know whether he will kill Kurtz or join him.

Brando, difficult as he was, really was perfect for the role. In a mixture of scripted and ad-libbed dialogue, Brando captures the manic insanity of Kurtz. No, not insanity; I read an interview once -- I can't remember who said it, perhaps Grant Morrison -- that discussed the Batman villain the Joker. In it, the interviewee described the Joker as possessing not a madness but a kind of "super-sanity," one that worked on a level that was utterly mad but made sense on a level no normal person could process. Kurtz reached this level after witnessing the VC hack off the arms of every child in a village that his Special Forces team inoculated, simply because they refused that the children receive aid from the enemy. "If I had 10 divisions of such men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly," he intones. Kurtz, a decorated, respected officer who'd seen combat in Korea and in a previous tour of 'Nam, snapped not because of war but because the jungle brought out his primal behavior, the kind that resides in all of us.

There's no truly satisfactory way to end such a film, one that mixes the visceral here-and-now of warfare with metaphysics, but the juxtaposition of two ritual sacrifices, one of tribesmen killing a water buffalo and the other of Willard slaying Kurtz, the bloated, weakened king so that he might die with dignity, is brilliant. Willard emerges to a tribe of warriors already willing to bow to him, but he simply heads back to the boat with Lance and sets off, as Kurtz's immortal "The horror. The horror" plays over a shot of a stone face of the compound. While he's been completely broken by the experience, forever haunted by what he did and what happened to him, he stands as the better man, for he did not lose himself in the jungle.

According to some, Apocalypse Now stands as the last great American film (those who disagree cite Scorsese's Raging Bull). While I would venture to say that 2007's one-two punch of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood changed that, you could certainly argue that no other films in the interim combined the epic scale of Coppola's final masterpiece with its personal and psychological themes. Coppola began production on the film in 1976, seven years after John Milius completed the first draft of his screenplay. Three years, one heart attack, a hurricane and numerous other production delays later, it finally reached screens.

"What must people have thought then?" I often wonder when seeing a film ahead of its time. I know that Gene Siskel famously gave it a negative review when he first saw it, only to later perform a mea culpa and give it a positive review. Mainstream Vietnam movies had only just started getting releases, and they tended to convey how the war affected its soldiers, who were always brave and cruelly destroyed by a pointless war. Apocalypse Now dared to suggest that this war simply brought out the worst in us, that its soldiers were by and large terrified and looking for any chance to get home, that we were still responsible for our actions even if the government forced thousands to fight.

The film netted Oscars for Murch and Storaro, but it's safe to say that it was robbed in every other category in which it received a nomination, and how Duvall didn't get a nod for Supporting Actor will keep me scratching my head for hours. Apocalypse Now is more than the greatest Vietnam film ever made, more than the best war film period; it is a document of a part of man that no amount of conditioning and evolution will ever fully eradicate, and it's a beast that can emerge with only a strong push.

The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

A tragically lesser-known work from once-masterful director Francis Ford Coppola (let's just leave the post-70s work out of it, shall we?), The Conversation's only flaw was in its release. Coppola made the film after the success of The Godfather, and the film premiered in the same year as The Godfather, Part II. The man could have defecated diamonds at a press conference and we'd be talking about that less all these years later than the first two Godfather entries. However, The Conversation stands as perhaps Coppola's tautest film, and one of the best thrillers ever made.

Gene Hackman gives the performance of his career as Harry Caul, a legend in the surveillance industry so revered by his peers and so self-confident that it took me nearly all of the film to realize how terrible he is at his job. He manages to record an adulterous couple in a park using a brilliant microphone set-up that no-else would have dreamt up, only to get personally involved with the case and even lose the tapes. He triple-locks his doors, yet his landlady manages to get in to leave him a present.

Caul also suffers from intense fear of people and a desperate need for privacy, ironic considering how me makes his living. When he's not pouring over his tapes, filtering out all the distortion and background noise. "All I want is a nice, fat recording," he says to his assistant Stan (John Cazale). Well, I say "assistant;" Caul never lets the poor man in on his methods, never shows him the tricks of the trade. I'm actually unsure what it is that he does; Caul's can't even trust the only man who has the slightest idea what Caul does and how he does it.

The two are hired to spy on this couple by the woman's husband, a wealthy business executive (Robert Duvall), who remains unseen for most of the film. Ergo, he entrusts his proxy Stett (Harrison Ford) to deal with Caul. Stett acts curt and sinister from the start, and only gets worse as Caul's neurosis begins to seep into the film. Caul refuses to give the tapes to Stett,and soon he sees the man everywhere he goes. On the recording, he notices the wife's lover tell her "He'd kill us if he had the chance," and he fears that the husband and Stett will murder the two if he relinquishes the tapes.

Late in the film, Caul attends a surveillance expo, where all the names in the biz meet and perversely discuss their profession as if it were any other business. His chief competitor, Moran (Allen Garfield) demonstrates a new bugging device that turns the victim's (let's just call a spade a spade) phone into a microphone without ever needing to modify that telephone. Stan works for him now after finally getting sick of Caul's attitude towards him, and Harry asks him to come back to work for him. Why I can't say. Moran somehow convinces Harry to bring him and some guests back to his workshop.

Here Caul comes alive for the first time; Stan brings up the park job and Harry beams at his own ingenuity. For a man who hates strangers, he sure does like to be the object of adoration. But he turns back into his usual self when he finds that Moran bugged him as a joke, and throws out all the guests except a woman who seduces him. When he wakes up, the tapes are gone.

The film then takes a step in a strange direction. Caul dreams of the adulterous woman he tries to protect, and divulges to the apparition revealing moments of his childhood. The word 'caul' means one of two things: a spider's web, appropriate for a thriller, and a thin covering that surround the fetus to prevent it from drowning. Caul tells his vision of a moment when he was very young where his mother left him alone in the bath and he nearly drowned. Caul also wears a flimsy, transparent raincoat throughout the film, regardless of the weather. From this dream we can figure out why Caul doesn't trust anyone, and why he's always so depressed.

As the film heads towards the conclusion, it suddenly kicks into overdrive, complete with downright hallucinatory visions. Caul heads to a hotel to try to warn the two lovers, only to hear terrible screams and see blood splash against the window of his adjacent room. He sneaks into their room later and flushes the running toilet, only for blood to surge out and flood the bathroom, sending Caul into a psychotic episode.

The film then ends on a shocking twist, one that hammers home Coppola's message, that simply spying on someone's conversation divorces it from context and, often, inflection. The entire film rests on which words are stressed in just one sentence and the dire consequences of misinterpreting them. Coppola wrote the script way back in the 1960s, but the film opened amidst the fallout of the Watergate scandal, and the parallels are just too good to simply dismiss as coincidence. Coppola surely didn't intend it, but The Conversation represents the paranoia and resentment created with the realization that someone could listen in on your most private moments at any time.

Ultimately, though, The Conversation is, apart from one of the most intelligent and unpredictable thrillers ever made, a attempt to capture sound: how we perceive it, how we interpret it, how it builds in our minds more than any other sense. Sound is probably the most difficult aspect of the movies to criticize and analyze, as it is the element that has to seem more natural than anything else. Even when disturbing and unexpected noises suddenly fill our eardrums, we believe them because the rest of the time we hear normal footsteps, normal insects, normal speech. The Conversation flips all that on its ear, and uses perversions of what we expect to hear to leave in a state of constant distress, begging for a release that only comes when the film has fully drained us of energy.