This is the movie everyone has been waiting for all year.
It's a rip-snorting action-adventure movie that youngsters and adults can
enjoy. It's an exciting roller-coaster ride through some classic Hollywood
adventure yarns; yet it's totally unself-conscious, uninhibited and
freewheeling. Although the film borrows from other films, it seems fresh and
sparkling enough to be new. It glows with innocence and fun.
Directed by Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Close Encounters) and produced by
George Lucas (Star Wars), Raiders is an improbable adventure set in the
'30s about an improbable archeologist (winningly played by Harrison Ford) who
is in a race with the Nazis to get to an elusive artifact, a chest in which
Moses deposited the broken tablets of the Ten Commandments. The artifact is the
source of mysterious powers that both the Americans and the Nazis want.
Raiders is consistently entertaining and diverting. The characters are
cartoon figures whose dialogue should be spoken in balloons coming out of their
mouths. Yet your acknowledgement of this in no way interferes with your
appreciation of the film.
Raiders is a contemporary version of the Perils of Pauline, with Harrison
Ford as Pauline. The film makes you jump and squirm with Ford in his efforts to
outwit the Nazis who are trying to destroy him. Spielberg-Lucas know how to
make you twitch. You jump as much as Ford does when he's inadvertently dropped
into a snake pit that features the slimiest snakes you've ever seen.
The film works at ingeniousness. It features a political monkey, a
treacherous monkey with Nazi sympathies who perches on the shoulders of the
protagonists and whispers duplicitous information in their ears.
But Raiders isn't as humorless and tedious as the standard contemporary
horror fare. It has real humor. As Ford puts it at one point when someone asks
him what he's going to do next:
"I don't know. I'm making this up as I go along."
For the kids, Ford is the prototypical hero. For the adults, he's the
Humphrey Bogart who redeemed The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He puts himself through the most arcane stunts
and adventures with a poker-faced integrity that is totally familiar to any
observant student of the Hollywood film.
Raiders moves with the whip-cracking smartness of all too few films in
the current Hollywood lexicon. It never pauses to rest on its laurels. It has a
restless energy and an urge to entertain that has become quite unfamiliar to
the contemporary moviegoer. It loves to fake youout. Its climax is a tour de
force of surrealism, an impressive cinematic way of talking and describing.
Raiders is an assured, relaxed, impressive work.
It's almost impossible to resist.
It's no more substantial than cotton candy - but it's easily the best piece
of entertainment Hollywood has produced in 1981.
Copyright © 1981 Globe Newspaper Company