Indy and his father manage to get aboard a zeppelin out of Germany, headed I suppose for Hatay, where the grail is apparently hidden. They are pursued by third villain Vogel but Indy disposes of him without too much trouble.

Indy and his father, safe for a moment, have a moment to talk. Indy is now within striking distance of his goal, but finds, once the opportunity presents itself, he cannot speak. First he’s too angry, then he’s too intimidated — communication seems to be beyond him and he says he can’t think of anything to talk about. Dad, relieved to have the onus of communication lifted, cheerfully invites Indy to “get down to work” with him on recovering the grail.

And it’s not a very deep insight, but here in this scene is the core of the movie — Indy wants to communicate with his father, and his father, through his disinterest in communication, hits on a simple truth. Men, not just fathers and sons, communicate best through shared action. Longtime reader of this journal “The Editor” wondered yesterday if Spielberg’s fan-base is largely male because of Spielberg’s Oedipal issues, and while there is certainly truth to that, I think it’s more that Spielberg understands that men tend to show their affection most purely through action, not through words. When a father wants to show he loves his son, he plays catch with him, or builds a model with him, or goes camping with him. When men want to show they love each other, they play basketball or watch the game — or make a movie. Indy doesn’t know it at the moment, but his father’s avoidance of communication and insistence upon action will lead to a deeper, more profound communication than a simple conversation would.

Anyway, the zeppelin turns around, Indy and his father escape via handy biplane (don’t try this at home) and beat the bad guys in a comic aerial shootout, which deposits them, apparently, in the country of Hatay (which I just found out is a real place — live and learn).

ACT III (1:22:00-2:05:00)

Donovan, having collected Vogel, Elsa and Marcus, arrives in Hatay and bribes the local Grand Poobah into providing soldiers and military hardware for the journey to the Canyon of the Crescent Moon. I wonder what they have told the Grand Poobah — “hey, there is a completely uninteresting thing we’d like to go and fetch out of one of your local ancient wonders — is that okay with you?” Apparently the locals either don’t know about the Canyon of the Crescent Moon (funny that the Holy Grail would be secreted in a location with an obviously Islam-inspired name) or they don’t care to venture there — what with the decapitating-machines and whatnot inside.

Donovan ventures out into the desert with his team, and, in an inversion of a similar beat in Raiders, is besieged in a canyon by Frank Zappa and his team of grail-protecting zealots. No sooner is this shootout over than Indy swoops down with his team to get Marcus, setting into motion the biggest action set-piece of Last Crusade, the typically fluid, typically rousing, typically expert tank battle. This tank battle is wonderful stuff: inventive, witty, exhaustive in its exploration of possibilities. It’s as though Spielberg and his team of thinkers sat down and made a list of every possible physical gag that could occur in, on and around a moving tank — and then figured out a way to include them all, in order of escalating thrills, ending with a Duel-like plunge off a cliff, which kills Vogel.

On the other hand, the tank battle is very well done, but it’s nothing compared to, say, the last half-hour of Temple of Doom, with its triple-play fist-fight, minecar-chase, suspension-bridge climax, or Raiders‘ relentless Well-of-Souls, fight-at-the-airstrip, truck-chase roundelay. The action beats in Last Crusade, while not exactly perfunctory, are easier, breezier and less momentous than those of the other movies. Obviously a decision was made, early on in production, to make Last Crusade more of a comedy, a buddy comedy even. A buddy comedy being, of course, a variation on a romantic comedy. And so we see that Last Crusade has an almost-classic romantic comedy plot: boy finds father, boy loses father, boy gets father back. And vice versa — father also loses and finds boy — the tank battle ends with Dad thinking Indy dead and regretting not talking to him. At which point Indy is revealed to not be dead after all, at which point Dad forgets all about talking and insists on pressing on — “We’re so near the end!” he beams.

And so all the principles gather in the Canyon of the Crescent Moon (which is, of course, Petra, a place cool enough in its own right) to go after the grail. And the screenwriter says “but I thought the protagonist wants to talk to his father, not go after the grail, how is the protagonist supposed to care about getting the object that he’s spent the whole movie saying he’s not interested in?” At which point Donovan obligingly shoots Dad, pressing the issue rather expertly I thought.

And so Donovan’s action (shooting Dad) becomes more powerful than any words of threat, and Dad’s lifelong quest for the grail becomes the son’s quest, as it is the only way for Indy to achieve his larger goal of communication with his father. To accentuate this, Indy and his father, through the action of fulfilling the “tests” inside the tomb, communicate on an almost Elliott-and-E.T. level of awareness. Father and son might spend their whole lives gabbing about this or that archaeological anecdote, but through action they find their real communion. Dad has what he is good at (academic details and stern discipline), son has what he is good at (problem-solving and improvisation) and, between the two of them, they get to the Maguffin (actually the second Maguffin, the diary is the first) and, through it, achieve the protagonist’s goal. Whew! That’s a lot to load onto the last set-piece of a movie, and one of the high marks in Last Crusade‘s favor is how it wears all this lightly and with easy grace.

After all the dust has settled, Indy has what he wants — communication with his father.  One could even say that Indy hasfound communion with his father by literally following in his footsteps — including bedding the same woman.  In any case, in the end, his father has given up his quest for the grail (“Indy — let it go”) and found his son.  “Illumination” is what he says he has found, which echoes a line from the prelude, where the father is heard asking for “illumination” from the bible to help him find the grail.  The illumination he finds, I suppose, comes from the realization that the grail is nice, providing eternal life and all, but his son is the true light of his life.  Which is too corny to say that way, which is why the screenwriter shortens and encodes it in the single word.

Of course, what neither Indy, nor his father, nor Marcus, nor Elsa, nor Donovan, nor Hitler knows is that the Holy Grail isn’t “the cup of Christ,” it’s Audrey Tatou. And, if you really want to press me on it, I don’t find the grail mythology as presented in Last Crusade especially compelling or even interesting — the knights and the secret tomb and the multiple magical properties and the multiple-choice grail challenge. But that’s okay — the movie isn’t really about the Holy Grail, which is as it should be — it’s a bad idea to make a movie about an object or an idea, no matter how fascinating the object or idea might be. That goes for sharks, flying saucers, dinosaurs, Nazis, airplanes, invaders from Mars, ghosts, psychic powers, robots or the invasion of Normandy. Stories are about people — if the “personal” story isn’t there, no one’s going to care about all the “cool stuff” you present — although Spielberg knows how to present cool stuff better than just about anybody. That, in the end, is, I think, why the Indiana Jones movies just seem better than other action-adventure movies — the warmth of the character, even if he never actually “learns” anything, presents a human story each time, not just a series of set-pieces.

Jim, we see, like Donna Stratton in 1941, has a fetish for warplanes — he admires their power. We will come to find that Jim admires power for its own sake — part of Jim’s story how he learns to survive, like the ancient Italian whoremonger in Catch-22, by surrendering to whoever seems to be in power at any given time. Aircraft, for Jim, are always a symbol of a greater power — this he shares, of course, with Roy Neary in Close Encounters.

At the close of Act I, in Spielberg’s most sophisticated crowd-mayhem setpiece yet, Shanghai is invaded by the Japanese and Jim is separated from his parents and his lifestyle.

ACT II (27:00-1:02:00) This multi-part, complicated act involves Jim’s journey from wealthy British expat to prisoner of war. Separated from his parents, he returns home, assuming they will meet him there. Instead of finding his parents, he finds his servants looting the place. When he challenges them he receives a slap in the face. He stays in his house until he runs out of food, then ventures into the city as the Japanese occupation takes hold. He tries to surrender to the Japanese army, who laugh at him. He is chased through the streets by a teenage orphan boy, who is unnamed but who isexactly the right age to be a grown-up Short Round from Temple of Doom.

(Most of the direction in Empire of the Sun is fresh, daring and a new page for Spielberg, although he does occasionally overstate a beat or rely on his fluent shooting skills to turn an action beat into a visual gag. In Act I, Jim doesn’t just have one or two plane hanging from his bedroom ceiling, his room is festooned with model planes, and they all move in the breeze. In the brilliant Shanghai sequences, when Jim is chased by Short Round, Spielberg cannot resist an off-tone do-si-do on a crowded street of rickshaws. And when Jim walks past the local movie theater, they are, of course, showing Gone With The Wind.)

Jim tries to find other Brits, is refused by the Japanese and is threatened by the locals. He is eventually found by Frank and Basie, a couple of American black-marketeers. He is, at first, seen as valuable for sale or trade, and Jim embraces his status as commodity in this new reality as eagerly as he embraced his status as rich-kid. Jim, in his desperate search for authority, has an unerring eye for figuring out who is in charge. If heartless capitalism is in charge, well then, he’ll be a happy commodity and strive to be a worthy commodity.

The locals don’t want to buy Jim as a slave, and Basie is about to cut Jim loose when Jim, facing another loss of an authority figure, quickly sells out his birthright, advising Basie to loot his home in the suburbs. His home, in his absence, has been taken over by the Japanese and he, Basie and Frank are taken prisoner.

Jim is relocated to an internment camp, where he meets the Brits he knew in the suburbs now reduced to refugees. They are shattered, but Jim, taking his cues from wily capitalist Basie, learns how to live in this environment. When it comes time to be transferred to a larger camp, Basie is ready to give up Jim in a flat second, and Jim has to figure out a new way to scam a ride.

And somewhere in this part of the movie I jotted down in my notes “fiercely committed performance from Christian Bale.” Indeed, you watch Bale’s performance in this movie and you have no trouble imagining the man who will eventually go on to do American Psycho, The Machinist and Batman Begins.

ACT III (1:07:00-1:37:00) At the Soochow Internment Camp, adjoining a Japanese airfield, we see Jim mastering the system, playing every conceivable angle to ensure his survival. He steals, trades, gambles and gets by on pluck and charisma. This, in his mind, makes him an American. The Brits we focus on, a doctor and Mr. and Mrs. Victor, the despairing couple with whom Jim shares a room, are too wrapped up in their cultural identity to bend much with their new circumstances. They refuse to bow to their Japanese captors and wilt under the humiliation of their reduced lives. The Americans, meanwhile, are full of energy and vigor, brimming with optimism and plans.

Meanwhile, across the street, so to speak, Jim is lured by the lives of the Japanese pilots, who might be flying off to their deaths, but at least they are committed to what they see as greater power, a fate Jim sees as ideal.

Jim also witnesses Mr. and Mrs. Victor making love, an early Spielberg stab at shooting an adult, realistic sex scene.

At the climax of the act, Jim negotiates a supposed minefield to capture a pheasant for Basie. The pheasant goes uncaptured and Jim survives the errand thanks to a fellow plane-crazy adolescent from the Japanese airfield, but Jim’s skill in negotiating minefields is already well established by this point in the narrative. For his survival skills and wiliness, Jim is granted admittance into the American barracks.

ACT IV (1:37:00-1:57:00) No sooner does Jim gain admittance into the American barracks than his father-figure Basie falls from grace. Caught stealing the camp commandant’s soap (that Jim stole for him), Basie is beaten and hospitalized, his possessions stolen by his fellow Americans — a clear argument against the limits of capitalism. When you’re on top, everything is great, but when your employees sense your weakness they will become your competitors and rip you off without a second thought.

Against this, the Kamikazes training next door seem more honorable and enticing than ever to young Jim. His teen pal from the airfield is getting ready to go on a bombing run when the American Air Force shows up, and Jim’s allegiance instantly shifts again to the force with the superior air power. He’s ready to embrace the attacking airplanes even if it means getting blown up. At the height of the American bomb run, the British doctor snaps him out of his delirium and Jim suddenly realizes that he doesn’t remember what his parents look like — his search for an authority has erased from his mind the most basic authority of all.

ACT V (1:57:00-2:25:00) The war over, the again-homeless Jim heads back the British barracks and the sad, tired Victors. His experiences have left him utterly confused about what is important — family, country, ideals, home? (It’s telling that Jim, born in Shanghai, has never seen the Britain everyone tells him is his home.) And it’s to Spielberg’s credit that he doesn’t offer an easy answer — every solution to Jim’s problem comes with its own difficulties.

The camp commandant flees, the teen Kamikaze next door can’t get his plane off the ground, Basie vanishes and the British trudge like sheep toward the city. Jim throws the suitcase that bears his name, and contains all his identity, into the river. None of the authorities Jim has pursued have turned out to be up to the task.

The Brits arrive in an abandoned stadium, where all their precious belongings are being stored like a ruling-class yard sale. Jim finds his family’s limousine and camps out there with the ailing Mrs. Victor. Mrs. Victor dies in the night and Jim awakens to see the flash of the atomic bomb — the ultimate authority in this conflict, which Jim mistakes for Mrs. Victor’s soul ascending into Heaven. In that moment, Mrs. Victor, who symbolizes Britain, Mother and sex object for Jim, is consumed by death, fused in his mind with the unanswerable power of the dawn of the atomic age.

His identity annihilated and with nowhere else to go, Jim heads back to the internment camp where, unexpectedly, supply canisters drop from the sky and Jim finds himself in a world of plenty. In a mirror of Act II, Jim, at home in this place of homelessness, rides his bike around the deserted camp, picking up chocolate bars, cans of milk and cartons of cigarettes. He meets up with his Japanese Kamikaze friend, who is killed by Basie, who has come back to loot the camp and move on. He tries to bring the Kamikaze back to life, assuming, for a moment, the authority that he’s been searching for throughout the movie. Soon the American army shows up and Jim gratefully “surrenders” to them.

Shortly thereafter, Jim is reunited with his parents at an orphanage. They don’t recognize him at first and he doesn’t recognize them at all. What would ordinarily be a crushing Spielberg moment of reunion is undercut, both by Jim’s loss of identity and by his newly-won skepticism. Confronted with his mother, he inspects her, rather like one would inspect a gift horse, touching her lipstick, scrutinizing her hair.

At the end of this, Spielberg’s most complex, most ambitious, most daring, least sentimental movie yet, Jim is restored to “his place,” as the son of a wealthy British family, but in another sense he will never be the same, and the final shot is of his suitcase, still adrift, in the harbor of Shanghai.