THE ADVENTURES OF INDIANA JONES - THE COMPLETE DVD MOVIE COLLECTION

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
Illustrious excavator Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) seeks the Ark of the Covenant, an ancient treasure chest containing the original stone tablets for The Ten Commandments...
As with Back to the Future and, to a lesser extent, Star Wars, my affection for Raiders of the Lost Ark is localized: Raiders packs so much into its running time that repeat viewings have the same effect as sequels--and repeat viewings in multiple really are preferable to the sequels we were given. Its raison d'ętre to evoke the spirit of the matinee adventures director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas enjoyed in their youth, Raiders of the Lost Ark doesn't quite lend itself to continuation in the way its impetus may suggest because those serials weren't single-sitting affairs lasting the length of a feature. If the film has any shortcomings, mind you, they're related to its absence of a rationale deeper than the rejuvenation of sleeping dogs; Raiders comes close to saying something in an improvised bit of business whereby our archaeologist hero responds to a menacing swordsman's provocation with a bullet, but any thoughts that this is a statement about colonialism are quickly dashed by the knowledge that Ford had dysentery and was too fatigued to perform the duel as scripted. That boulder avalanche, though...the Hovitos..."bad dates"...the coat-hanger gag...the revolving mirror cuffing Indy on the chin...the oblique reference to Citizen Kane in the nasty epilogue... What's not to love? It's a sublime picture, maybe the best of the eighties on a level of pure entertainment.

Raiders of the Lost Ark cover Paramount/Lucasfilm's DVD of Raiders of the Lost Ark re-christens the film Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark on the cover art but not on-screen, thank goodness. Nevertheless, Curious George could not resist the urge to tamper with a classic whose imperfections are as canonical as its intentionalities: erased, inasmuch as I could tell, is the reflection on the glass partition separating Ford and a live cobra; it appears, too, that matte lines during Richard Edlund's lightshow have been de-emphasized à la the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man for the Ghostbusters DVD. (The background plates are so mismatched in terms of depth of field as to render this a most egregious adjustment.) Despite these unconfirmed alterations, a rig stowed beneath a truck to send the vehicle soaring remains in full view. Like the successive films in the widescreen edition of the " The Adventures of Indiana Jones - The Complete DVD Movie Collection," Raiders is presented in a THX-certified 2.35:1 transfer with incredible Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. (Let it be said now that these films are molested in pan-and-scan; the studio's willingness to cater to the anti-letterbox contingent by foisting full-frame versions of Indiana Jones 1, 2 & 3 on yet another video format is subversive of the properties themselves.) In the LaserDisc era, Raiders was the LD I would use to flaunt my meagre set-up's capabilities, and it sounds even closer to the memorable six-track, 70MM roadshow release on DVD. Dr. Jones' entrance looks as coarse as it ever did, but the image, more often than not, is lush, even appetizing.

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
Indy searches for a stolen rock the people of the Mayapore hills believe is their lifeblood.
The problem with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is articulated by its ironically-chosen theme song, "Anything Goes." It's a trial, but not for the reason--its "darkness"--that Spielberg has all but disowned it. In fact, both Raiders and Last Crusade are objectively darker, the former finding a vengeful God boiling the skin off His witnesses, the latter introducing betrayal into the clear-cut morality of the previous films, yanking Indy by the leather lapels into the realm of noir. (Noir is, after all, French for "black.") No, what's wrong is that, for all his artistry, Spielberg is rarely able to mix a cohesive genre cocktail: he can shoehorn sentimentality into almost any setting, but when it comes to demonstrating his craft through segues, he comes up short. The picture would make a brain-frying double-bill with 1941, Spielberg's other herky-jerky free-for-all, which, unlike Temple of Doom, lacked the franchise affiliation that kept Doom from bombing.

My mentor Peter Fairburn once advised that the prologue to Temple of Doom is a self-contained masterpiece of montage; that he's right should tell you that the movie is entirely too divisible. Performed by the future Mrs. Spielberg Kate Capshaw, the opening number sanctions Busby Berkeley spoofery (with Spielberg at the helm, it's parody sorely lacking in Berkeley's kink) before giving way to a delicious homage to Shanghai-set thirties pictures like The General Died at Dawn (another of Fairb's faves--and mine, too). You know the score: champagne flutes, elegant and imposing Chinese gangsters in cardboard tuxes, a nightclub with expansive interiors of gauzy white. Tommy guns will be brandished, our hero will ingest poison for which there's an antidote in a nearby vial, and the moll--a blonde, natch--will trade sides. Once we meet Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), the pre-pubescent Chinese pickpocket-cum-getaway driver who functions as Indy's surrogate son, Temple of Doom takes a turn for the worse; the popularity of the film led to the impersonation of Short Round's pidgin English on playgrounds everywhere, a source of scars for many Asian immigrants of my generation, and the character is irresponsibly drawn in other ways, too, for Indy never once stops to consider the danger in which he repeatedly places Short Round. Jeff Goldblum's desire to shield his daughter from harm's way in Spielberg's later The Lost World: Jurassic Park would attempt to atone for this, but the damage was done.

Short Round is obviously a good luck charm--a by-product of Spielberg's success with kids, both as actors and as audience members. Fittingly, he introduces the first of the auteur's water-treading self-imitations within the film, aping the moment from Jaws where Sean Brody's youngest mimics his gestures. Temple of Doom also finds Spielberg playing right into the trap of the critical establishment's perception of him as suffering a Peter Pan complex with a lost boys scenario (Indy is recruited to free the kidnapped children of an Indian village) that has the gall to climax with an alligator deciding the outcome of a swordfight between Indy and the high priest of the Kali cult's "Thuggee" sect. Meanwhile, Spielberg recycles on behalf of producer Lucas the trash-compactor scene from Star Wars (already a steal from Republic shorts), cannibalizes the first film's aforementioned gun/sword duel, and stages a royal feast where eyeball soup and chilled monkey brains are served in the name of cheap gross-out laughs, regardless of how it might impact India's cultural reputation. (And yet, the filmmakers were livid that the Indian government denied them access to their jungles and palaces.) But hey, anything goes.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is the weakest of the DVDs in the trilogy set. While the 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen image is close to immaculate (and newly spotless in the normally dirt-plagued main titles), the Dolby Digital 5.1 track is detrimentally light on bass; the otherwise loud and intricate audio wouldn't be such a let-down if we didn't have the room-rattling mixes of Raiders and Last Crusade to compare it to. Although the mid-nineties LaserDisc reissue of the film is not discretely encoded, its subwoofer usage is actually more guttural. Still, Temple of Doom has never been as easy on the eyes as it is here.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade cover

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE
Indy follows in the footsteps of his academic father (Sean Connery) by joining a quest for the Holy Grail.
Spielberg's "apology" for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom has fewer things "wrong" with it than Doom, I suppose, but if truth be told, I find it a heck of a lot duller. Spielberg repents by retreating to safe places, chiefly some known (or guessed-at) quantities of Raiders' success: the picture returns Indy to his university stomping grounds, going so far as to replicate the professor's lecture shot-for-shot (stopping just shy of doing the "I Love You" gag over again); bring back Indy's confidantes Marcus (Denholm Elliot) and Sallah (John Rhys-Davies); and restore Nazis to the villain fold. It's all so pandering as to become tiresome, and the departures from form, such as the aberrant buffoonery of Marcus and Sallah, are either ill-conceived or half-baked. The curiously tepid set-pieces spotlight Spielberg at his most mechanical (ask yourself if the showstopper in which Indy rides a stallion in pursuit of a tank--one possible inspiration for Adaptation.'s "technology vs. horse" punchline--merely stops the show), and as delightful as Connery is playing Indy's dad, it de-romanticizes the titular globetrotter to acknowledge his provenance. I'm not sure that's what the series wanted for. A murkily realized femme fatale (Alison Doody) adds insult to injury.

Regardless, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a stunner on DVD. The 2.35:1 anamorphic video restores saturation to Douglas Slocombe's cinematography that was seemingly filtered out in previous transfers; contrast and shadow detail approach an elusive perfection. Last Crusade's Dolby Digital 5.1 track is the most aggressive of the three films, if less intricate than loud--Ben Burtt's Oscar for Best Sound Effects Editing to the contrary.

BONUS MATERIAL
Find on this disc a trio of progressively shorter retrospectives for each of the films that, when combined, total 126 minutes, coincidentally the duration of the third and longest Indiana Jones feature. By the Last Crusade portion, it's clear that all involved are tapped out: without warning, the participants go from doling out information to summarizing the plot--and lazily, at that. In print interviews, Spielberg has said he thought doing Last Crusade would help him to exorcise lingering demons about his relationship with his own father, but the production is portrayed as neither a cathartic nor an especially joyful experience by supplementals producer Laurent Bouzereau, who gets the most mileage out of his Raiders material. At last, Tom Selleck's screen test for the role of Indy sees the light of day (he's not awful, just Magnum-like), and Lucas hangs himself with statements like "I'm lazy" and the admission that he didn't want to cast Ford, lest the actor be perceived as his "Bobby De Niro." (Good thinking--it's not like the Scorsese/De Niro collaboration had yielded any lasting results.) The Temple of Doom piece is almost as intriguing thanks to Spielberg's eagerness to snitch on Lucas for pretending that Indiana Jones stories subsequent to Raiders were as good as written in order to extract a verbal commitment for a trilogy, as well as Capshaw's defense of her regressive female character and the account of Ford's herniated spine, an impairment that forced Spielberg to shoot with a double for several weeks as the actor recuperated from a controversial surgical treatment. I learned a lot from these segments, though I didn't feel exceptionally nourished.

Also on board are must-see featurettes--replete with archival footage--specific to the "Stunts" (11 mins.), "Sound" (13 mins.), "Music" (12 mins.), and "Light and Magic" (12 mins.) of Indiana Jones. Stunt coordinator Vic Armstrong's explanation of how the rolling-ball was achieved without the use of opticals is a lesson in ingenuity, and an amusing tribute to recurring bit player Pat Roach offers a surprise or two. It's also nice to finally check in with composer John Williams (whose Indiana Jones theme is the heart-and-soul of the trilogy), who's not so much as mentioned in the omnibus documentary, while Ben Burtt's work on Raiders is justly honoured with revelatory and enthusiastic recollections ("This jungle is gonna be so friggin' alien," was Spielberg's reaction to the animal noises that Burtt had fabricated for the beginning of the movie). And it is, of course, refreshing to hear Lucas extol the virtues of cheaply-accomplished, pre-CGI special effects.

Teaser, theatrical and reissue trailers for Raiders of the Lost Ark, the trailer for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and the unique teaser and theatrical trailers for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are here rather than on their respective platters in order to maximize the bitrate for the trio of films. A preview of the Lucas Arts videogame "The Emperor's Tomb" and a weblink to INDIANAJONES.COM round out this fourth disc. Raiders of the Lost Ark and the quartet of mini-docs justify the mandatory purchases of Temple of Doom and Last Crusade; the DVDs are individually housed in keepcases packaged together in a cardboard-and-leatherette container.-Bill Chambers

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