What's Old Is Gold: A Triumph for Indy

By RICHARD CORLISS

"Tell me a story, Dad."

So the father tells a story of a modern knight in fedora and leather jacket, a disinterested seeker of treasure and truth who leaps vast crevices, evades killer boulders, outwits nasty Nazis and dodges vengeful spirits while searching for the legendary Ark of the Covenant. The child is beguiled, and Dad is impressed, despite himself. Pretty good yarn Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Next night. "Tell me another story the same, but different."

This time Dad sends the rogue archaeologist to India to battle child- enslaving thugs, take a roller-coaster ride through lower Hades and narrowly escape the world's first heart surgery performed without benefit of anesthesia Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

"Pretty scary, huh, Son?" The child shivers, then shrugs.

Third night. "Tell me another story, Dad -- the same, but different and better!"

Moviegoers have two surrogate storytelling dads: George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Lucas, who dreamed up Star Wars for a generation of space cadets, is the mastermind of the Indiana Jones series. Spielberg directed the trilogy, which reaches its thrilling climax this week when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade opens on 2,327 movie screens in the U.S. and Canada. The star is Harrison Ford -- three times Indy Jones, three times Star Wars' Han Solo and the unchallenged hero of a derring-do, me-too movie decade.

And for their newest, most invigorating collaboration, these three godfathers of the '80s action epic have adopted a father of their own. Sean Connery, who as James Bond helped sire the thrill-machine genre, brings his masterly charm to the role of Indiana's estranged dad Henry Jones. Lucas and Spielberg, Ford and Connery prove that a sequel can be as fresh as the face of a teenage Indy confronting his first hairbreadth challenge. Indy 3 is the same, different and better. It infuses vitality into the action-adventure, a movie staple whose ravenous popularity and endless, predictable permutations have nearly exhausted it. -

Something similar might be said of Hollywood this summer -- the so-called summer of the sequels. Between now and August, moviegoers will be offered up seconds of Ghostbusters and Lethal Weapon, a third Karate Kid, fifths of Star Trek and A Nightmare on Elm Street, an eighth Friday the 13th and, for the 17th time around, James Bond, in Licensed to Kill.

Is this sequel mania evidence of economic health or of creative bankruptcy? Cunningly, the theatrical-film industry has held its ground against the marauding armies of the video revolution. In fact, one format has fed the other, as audiences first view pictures on the big screen, then supplement their cinema appetite at home. Last year saw record grosses both for theatrical films and for videocassettes. But movie budgets have increased as well, and even a gambling man turns cautious with $40 million on the table. Hence the moguls have relied on brand names and roman numerals.

This summer, the experts say, everything old is gold again. "1989 has the makings to break all records," says Larry Gerbrandt of Paul Kagan Associates, a media-research firm. "We're seeing sequels to some of the most successful movies ever. And since no two of the big ones are being released head to head, each of them could hit a home run." Notes producer Laurence Mark: "Sequels aren't necessarily about a failure of the Hollywood imagination. They're about lowering risks." So why, in a business full of expensive risks, shouldn't Hollywood be allowed just one near-sure thing?

In a way, every movie, every work of fiction, is a sequel -- the latest chapter in a book of stories as old as once upon a time. The narrative conventions are age-old too: that man defines his nature through action; that the path to wisdom winds through false friends and moral booby traps; that maps lead to buried treasure and X always marks the spot; that manly virtue will be rewarded with a king's garlands and a kiss at the fade-out. The Indy stories are just the most recent link in a chain forged at the first campfire, when an elder spun tales to keep the clan together and the demons at bay.

Tale spinners Spielberg and Lucas (who devised the story with Menno Meyjes) and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam were obviously brimming to work variations on the nearly $700 million-grossing theme. For openers, they toss teenage Indy (River Phoenix) into a nest of cave robbers, a lion's den and a snake pit, thereby explaining, with an economy that Feuillade and Freud might admire, the origins of their hero's hat, his favorite weapon and his fear of serpents. The movie's creators have not grown tired. They keep the action cracking as smartly as Indy's bullwhip.

"I've learned more about movie craft from making the Indiana Jones films than I did from E.T. or Jaws," says Spielberg, who won't take on Indy a fourth time. "And now I feel as if I've graduated from the college of Cliff- Hanger U. I ought to have paid tuition." Spielberg's camera style neither misses a trick nor reveals how it's done. See how he cues the change of a Zeppelin's course by the shadow scampering across a cocktail glass; watch a motif of cigarette lighters carry complicity from one character to another. Like a fine old haunted castle, his film has secret staircases of suspense, revolving panels of plot.

Indy 3, like Raiders, features airplane stunts, a brawl on a careering vehicle and a sacred quest: a search for the Holy Grail, the cup Jesus used at the Last Supper. The film expands the role of Denholm Elliott as a museum curator and tosses in a cameo appearance by Adolf Hitler, who autographs Henry's Grail diary. A new twist is Elsa (capable Alison Doody), a blond sorceress poised between greed and glory. She is an Indy gone wrong, and the series' first indispensable female.

A vamp is standard baggage in the thriller genre, especially in the Bond films, from which the Indy series took some sideways inspiration. In 1977 Spielberg told Lucas he wanted to make a James Bond movie. "I have something better than James Bond," Lucas replied, and sketched the scenario for Raiders. The Indy series bears traces of the Bond films in its superhero with an edge of surliness, its globe-girdling itineraries, its villains purring megalomania, its neat blend of macho cynicism and schoolboy pluck. But The Last Crusade has something better than James Bond. It has Sean Connery.

Since he eighty-sixed 007 almost two decades ago (with one aimless visit home in 1983 for Never Say Never Again), Connery has mothballed his toupee and gained a twilight twinkle. He is the movies' sexiest, most majestic older star. And yet at 58 Connery was thought too young to play Indy's father, who was originally conceived as a crotchety gent like On Golden Pond's Henry Fonda. It was Spielberg's idea to cast Connery, a decision that illuminated the film and its filming. "When Sean and Harrison arrived on the set," Spielberg recalls, "everyone got quiet and respectful. The two are like royalty -- not the royalty you fear because they can tax you, but the royalty you love because they will make your lives better."

Connery's arrival opened the script up to puckish revisions, as when Henry reveals he has slept with Elsa, with whom Indy has also dallied. At a "Huh?" of disbelief from Indy, Henry preens defensively, protesting, "I'm as human as the next man." Indy growls back, "I was the next man!" Would the Henry Jones character, as originally conceived, have slept with Elsa? "No," says Boam with impeccable movie logic, "but Sean Connery would."

"I wanted to play Henry Jones as a kind of Sir Richard Burton," Connery says. "There was so much behind him and so many hidden elements in his life." In the beginning Henry speaks to his long-lost son slowly, with wide eyes and grand gestures, as if Indy were a child in need of gentle remedial education. "I was bound to have fun with the role of a gruff, Victorian Scottish father," Connery says of Henry (remember, the Jones family hails from Utah). "And have fun I did -- so much so that I told Harrison, 'If you give me all the jokes, you'll really have to work for your scenes.' "

Ford, 46, who is married to E.T. screenwriter Melissa Mathison, is one of the world's richest actors. But he could have told Connery he's no stranger to hard work: he supported himself in lean times as a carpenter to the stars. He's had lean dreams too. "George and Steven may be living out their childhood fantasies on film," he says, "but I didn't come from the same crate of oranges." Indeed not. "My first childhood ambition was to be the guy who carried the coal from our house to the coal chute in a wheelbarrow. I remember there was this big pile of coal, and then he did his job, and then there was no coal. I liked the rhythm of his work. It was a job you could see getting done. My dad would come home from his job and talk about how unhappy everyone was there. And compared to that, I'd rather have shoveled coal. I was four or five."

Ford is a man who holds few illusions about star quality. Movie magic may be an aging prostitute under a harsh streetlight for a kid whose grandfather played vaudeville in blackface and whose father produced innovative TV commercials in Chicago. "One day I met the actor who played Sky King, the aerial ace," recalls the actor. "He turned out to be short, heavyset and unconventional looking. It intrigued me, how different show business was from what people thought. And maybe that disposition gave me a reality register that has been a fixture in my life."

Ford thinks the way Bogie talked, and he takes an old-fashioned movie star's pleasure in the craft of filmmaking. "I love to work," he says. "I like doing something difficult and complicated. It's like setting yourself in a maze and learning the maze so you always come out in the right place at the right time. I'm a technical actor. For me, acting is part intellectual, part mechanical. It's being in control of your mind and body at the same time. The emotions you show may be spontaneous, but the bricks have to be carefully laid to fit with the other pieces. You don't fool around with the work."

You don't fool around with Ford, or Indy. In the film's prologue, young Jones is chased and chastened by a band of scavengers. The gang's leader tells Indy, "You lost today, kid. But that doesn't mean you have to like it." Real-life flashback: when Ford was about young Indy's age, he entered a junior high school where, he recalls, "the favorite recess activity was to take me to the edge of a sharply sloping parking lot, throw me off, wait for me to struggle back to the top, then throw me off again. The entire school would gather to watch this display. I don't know why they did it. Maybe because I wouldn't fight the way they wanted me to fight. They wanted a fight they could win. And my way of winning was just to hang in there." He refused to be a sissy, so he would be Sisyphus.

"Other people gave up," Ford says of his hard-won acting eminence. "I don't give up. That's all." A good man to make a movie with, if you're Lucas and Spielberg and Connery. A great quartet of storytellers to watch riding off into the everlasting sunset at the end of Indiana Jones' last and best crusade.

With reporting by Elaine Dutka and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles and Jane Walker/Madrid