Charlie Higson: Indiana Jones vs James Bond... the transatlantic tussle of the superheroes
On the day the new Spielberg film premieres in Cannes, our columnist inspects the archaeology of cinematic action and finds a cultural chasm
In May of 1977 two friends who were well on their way to becoming the most successful film makers in the world were sitting together on a beach in Hawaii.
One of the friends was George Lucas. It was the opening weekend of Star Wars, and he was trying to escape all the hoo-ha. The other was Steven Spielberg, who had already made Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As usual, they talked about movies, movies they had seen, movies they had loved, movies they wanted to make. "You know what would be really cool, George," said Spielberg (and I'm paraphrasing here, you understand). "What would be really cool, Steven?" said Lucas. "To make a James Bond movie," said Spielberg. "A proper one, with Sean Connery."
Lucas agreed that this would indeed be really cool, but it was never going to happen, not in the way they wanted. Cubby Broccoli had a firm grip on Bond and wasn't about to let two young movie brats in on the act. But Lucas had a better idea. "Why not just make our own?" he said, and he went on to tell Spielberg about this idea for a movie he had had knocking around in his head. "It's not James Bond. It's set in the 1930s and it's about an archeologist. It's a modern James Bond film. You'll love it."
Spielberg did indeed love the idea, and thus Indiana Jones was born, out of all the favourite bits from the movies, TV shows and Tintin books that Lucas and Spielberg had loved as kids. It's all there in the films: rope bridges across ravines, pilot-less planes, evil Nazis, death rays, runaway mining cars, tanks, poison darts, snakes ....
It's interesting that Bond was their starting point, though, and there is still a lot of Bond in the finished product, like the "film within a film" pre-credits sequence. Lucas's original idea was for Jones to be even closer to the Bond blueprint. He had envisaged a suave, sophisticated playboy type in a sharp dinner suit. Spielberg wasn't interested in that. He specıalısed in down-home, straight-talking, tough-but-tender, all-American types. He pictured a character much closer to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. That neither of these incarnations bore any resemblance to any real-life archaeologist was neither here nor there. James Bond, after all, never bore any resemblance to a real-life spy.
But you can see Bond and Jones as examples of two very different types of hero. Bond is the American idea of a typical European. Well-dressed, well-mannered, elegantly unruffled, supercilious, a womaniser but ever so slightly gay. Jones is the American idea of an American. Practically dressed, no-nonsense, rugged, downbeat, put-upon, but a winner. It's telling that all the villains in Raiders of The Lost Ark are Europeans
