Film Talk: Looking Back – 'Why did it have to be snakes?' with Raiders of the Lost Ark
It was the flick that began the adventure and introduced the world to a character who would become one of cinema’s greatest ever icons.
Ladies and gentlemen, doth your caps (assuming you can grab them in time from under that closing trap door) to the man who single-handedly spawned the concept of the ‘swashbuckling archaeologist’, and brought back the bullwhip...
The first instalment in a truly fabled franchise, 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark stars Harrison Ford as archaeologist Indiana Jones, a maverick academic who battles a group of Nazis searching for the Ark of the Covenant and the supernatural powers it supposedly contains.
Directed by Hollywood heavyweight Steven Spielberg and written by Lawrence Kasdan from a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman, the film originated from Lucas’s desire to create a modern version of the serial films of the 1930s and 1940s.
If only he knew then the place it would come to hold on the altar of cinema...
