Bingowings said:
SilverWook said:
The banquet scene still freaks me out more than anything else.
You'd think they would have a stand next to the Indy ride at Disneyland selling chilled monkey brains!
This is another aspect of the film I find repulsive (in the wrong way).
India has possibly the best cuisine on the planet and yet they have a running gag about how not only is the food of the evil palace court insanely disgusting but the poor villagers too.
There was the potential for a very clever gag (no pun intended) there.
Willie could turn her nose up at the villager's food but actually find it delicious and she could then sit down to a delicious looking banquet which has been drugged (in readiness for her sacrifice) and start to see snakes coming out cakes and eyeballs in the soup which weren't really there.
Nobody notices because they just think she is an hysterical American, she is trying to pretend not to care because of her earlier embarrassment in the village but it sets up that something odd is happening to the people at the palace.
It would turn a rather racist joke into a Lynchian nightmare.
Actually, there was a scene which took place after the banquet. Indy says that he knows Indian cuisine and they would never serve what he saw there. This is his first tip off that something isn't right at the palace and he discusses this with the colonel. Shame it was cut, because as you mentioned, it comes off as overtly racist and ignorant. Having said that, the Indy films themselves are all pretty racist simply due to their colonial-era setting in which the capable white man must drop in and lead his arab/latino/asian helpers to safety/victory/triumph, as though they could never be capable of doing it themselves.
Personally, I love TOD. Not only is it one of my favourite films, I think it's the best of the Indy series. There's a great story in there, it's just not quite as complex as Raiders', but it shouldn't be, because the film wouldn't be as intense or scary if it had all the convoluted scene changes and characters that Raiders and Last Crusade had; that level of complexity worked for the other two, because they are similar in style, but the second film is apart. TOD is a horror film, and horror films are all about the psychological experience of watching them, and that's why the sheer "ride" aspect of the film, the intensity, whether in character (evil Indy), in storyline (human sacrifice), in mis-en-scene (all the bones and blood and fire) or in action sequences (mine cart, spike room, etc,) is a fundamental and integral part of how the film is constructed and how--and why--it works. There is simply no other film on the planet like TOD and it's because no filmmaker had the balls to go as intense as Spielberg went with the amount of money he had at his disposal.
He tries to pass it off to Lucas now, but I don't buy that for a second, Spielberg knew exactly what he was doing and he took that dark, spooky, gorey aspect of the film and ran with it. Maybe Lucas pushed it that direction in the first place, but Spielberg perfected it. He was into that kind of thing at the time--he had just finished Poltergeist, remember.