Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is in a way an apology for both Temple of Doom and 1941: the former in that Spielberg wants to prove that he can recapture the spirit of Raiders of the Lost Ark this time, and the latter in that he wants to prove he can direct comedy well, and in both respects, it… kind of works.
Given the response to the violence of Temple of Doom it was inevitable this follow-up would be by far the lightest of the series, and wanting to avoid its mistakes, Spielberg and Lucas considered a number of scripts far in advance; including a haunted mansion idea by Diane Thomas, an exotic Monkey King story by Chris Columbus, and a pilgrimage ending with a fight with a demon by The Color Purple writer Menno Meyjes. All contributed various things that found their way into Jeffrey Boam’s ultimate script, which additionally combined Lucas’ idea of a quest for the Holy Grail with Spielberg’s interest in a father-son dynamic to ground the story. That latter element really is what saves Last Crusade in the end.
After opening on a somewhat irrelevant flashback to Indy’s origins, in 1938 Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) learns that his father Henry (Sean Connery) has gone missing looking for the Holy Grail, a lifelong obsession of his. Henry’s business partner Walter Donovan (Julian Glover) recruits Indy into continuing the quest, but Indy only wants to rescue his father. However he gets roped into the grander journey once Donovan is revealed to be seeking the Grail for himself with the aid of the Nazis, finding, contending, and bonding with his father along the way.
The tone of Last Crusade is very much designed to emanate Raiders of the Lost Ark as much as it can. Its visuals are crisper, its adventure is more straightforward, its got heavier doses of action and effects (though the CGI hasn’t aged well), and its characters are actually engaging and likeable. Most of all though, the movie adds more comedy than either previous Indiana Jones outing to accommodate all this. From the point Indy meets his father the film is essentially a buddy movie, with the two trading insults and quips, and even getting into a few slapstick scenarios. During their adventure they escape the Nazis by motorbike, Zeppelin, biplane, and horse, and each of these sequences is played with facetiousness. This is a film where Indy gets Hitlers’ autograph at a book burning and ends with the reveal he’s named after a dog. In a way it’s almost the opposite extreme of Temple of Doom, but for one thing: the humour is actually conducive to the personalities, situation, and action. There’s great physical comedy in moments such as Sallah punching a henchman through a newspaper, and Indy, after avoiding a deadly fall, looking over the ledge his friends believe he perished on from behind them inconspicuously. And it’s rather fun seeing Harrison Ford and Sean Connery bounce off each other especially, the latter getting in a few Bond-ian one-liners, such as the improvised “she talks in her sleep” line.
This movie marks the point where Indiana Jones really moves away from the starker James Bond trappings by getting some personal development. Details of his life and history factor into the story, primarily for the purposes of expanding on his troubled relationship with his dad, but also to flesh out his character by giving him an origin. The opening sequence flashback is almost completely pointless to the rest of the story (the only connective tissue being a small reference to Henry’s interest in the Holy Grail). It exists to establish where Indy’s fear of snakes came from, his adventurous streak, and who he stole his look from, which is neat. It’s mostly just a curiosity, an excuse for River Phoenix to be cool, and a back-door pilot for The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. The better development comes out through Indy’s quest with Henry.
Last Crusade notably ditches the female companion/love interest formula to focus on this father/son dynamic, and it was the best call. We get a pretty decent femme fatale, Elsa played by Alison Doody, who enacts the romantic partner role in the first act, but is ultimately one of the villains. The film still tries to garner sympathy for her in a couple moments and make the audience believe there’s something genuine between her and Indy, but it’s unconvincing and feels out of place. Because among all the barbs and mock hostility between Indy and Henry there’s a real tension there and that’s what drives the story. Many have suggested that it was informed by Spielberg’s own distant relationship with his father. If so, his choosing to present resentment with an optimistic course, seems to indicate his own reconciliation or personal faith in one. Both gain the respect of the other by the end, Henry by inventively taking down a German plane and Indy by nearly dying to rescue Henry. And Ford and Connery have superb chemistry, showing real investment in this relationship and its history
This theme is expounded on further by how the film deals with the Holy Grail itself. Perhaps the greatest point of Boam’s script was his decision to break with the pattern of the artefacts being attained and having the Grail be lost to better support the importance of the central relationship. That being said, the movie doesn’t play it with much subtlety. After Elsa falls to her death, Indy tries to grab the Grail just out of reach, but is urged not to risk it by his father whose life he just saved with it. The moral of what’s really important is made explicit. Both Henry and Donovan were motivated to find the Grail out of selfishness, the former for its archaeological and religious prestige, and the latter for its power. But Indy through the whole journey was primarily doing it for his father, indirectly teaching Henry and himself that value of family; the culmination of their arc wouldn’t have had any real poignancy if they won their material prize. Glover is great as Donovan by the way, though he’s a very flat villain, not nearly as memorable as Belloq or even Mola Ram, and way more gullible than either of them.
The film embodies a very traditional “boys adventure” style especially in the last act. Indy, Henry, Sallah, and Marcus Brody (who’s there just because) become a de facto team of adventurers. And this is reminiscent not as much of an old serial as an old novel. If Indy is indeed based on Alan Quartermain, it would only be appropriate for him to have a Henry Curtis and Captain Good. There are issues with this -it’s worth noting the conscious choice to recapture the feel of the original by bringing back Sallah and Brody but not Marian -the boys adventure sub-genre always has had a “no girls allowed” undertone. Sallah is more or less the same as he was in Raiders and John Rhys-Davies is just as enjoyable; however Brody begins the movie similarly dignified and knowledgeable as he was before, but devolves over the course into a bumbling professor who according to Indy “once got lost in his own museum.” It’s a strange, inconsistent choice, and though Denholm Elliott is still great, more than deserving of the additional screen-time, I think there was enough comic relief coming from the other characters for him to have been played a little more straight.
There may also have been too many threads the movie was trying to juggle. Though he gives a good performance, Kevork Malikyan’s Kazim and the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword are pretty pointless, except to be Indy’s foes for the action set-piece in Venice before the Nazis are introduced. The fact they’re actually not bad guys and really a noble organization sworn to protect the Grail makes it kind of awkward how Indy just killed a bunch of them in the speedboat sequence. It’s a shame they’re done away with swiftly at the start of the convoy attack because they were an intriguing element.
Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade is that Spielberg film that probably wouldn’t have been much remembered if it didn’t have the Indiana Jones name. It’s witty, creative, and charming enough to have been a nostalgic gem like Hook otherwise, but it’s the most subdued of this action-adventure series. There’s a relative mellowness to the whole thing due to Spielberg’s softening of the tone and grounding the movie in a serious examination of Indy’s character and his relationship with his father. And I think that’s what Indiana Jones really needed to end off the trilogy. That and a final shot of four adventurers joyously riding off into the distance as a cap that begs no further resolution, at least for nineteen years...
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