Bullwhip in one hand, relic in the other and his fedora hanging on for dear life, Indiana Jones in action is a spectacular sight on the big screen.
His exploits also play out to a spectacular sound, thanks to one of the most memorable film themes to come out of Hollywood.
Composer John Williams has had enormous hits over his career, including the scores to the "Star Wars," "Superman" and "Jaws" blockbuster franchises, but with his soundtrack to "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in 1981, he discovered a particularly rich treasure.
Foremost is "The Raiders March," the film's main theme that appears whenever Harrison Ford does a heroic deed and essentially symbolizes Indiana Jones. The march is action distilled into musical notes; it is adventure personified. A trumpet fanfare belts out a soaring strain over the syncopated pulsing of a full orchestra. The melody is then varied as more instruments join in and the volume increases to climactic cadences.
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If Steven Spielberg and George Lucas created a paean to the action-packed Saturday-morning serials of their youth, Williams reached back to the lush orchestral film scores of the 1940s and '50s. It rings again in the ears of moviegoers thanks to "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" — although to many of us, the tune is so catchy it never really left.
Key to the success of "The Raiders March" is not just the clarion call of the trumpets' simple melody and jumps, but also Williams' fitting orchestration.
Play "The Raiders March" on the piano and it doesn't do much. By working in the medium of the orchestra rather than in synthesizers or chamber music, Williams was able to draw on a wide palette of tonal color. The trumpet has often personified power in classical compositions, and Williams uses it wisely here. Slowly introducing other instruments such as snare drum, cymbals and woodwinds augments the potency of the theme.
For all of Williams' notorious penchant for rather obvious influences from classical music's past — you can hear traces of Holst, Beethoven, Strauss, Orff and more in his film scores — he clearly is a master of how to exploit the orchestra to grand cinematic effect. At the very least in "The Raiders March" he drew upon the rich history of thematic personifications of heroism, not the least being Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Strauss' tone poems "Don Juan" and "Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life)" and Wagner's "Ring" operas.
"Some of these films by Spielberg and Lucas have 90-100 minutes of music — it's almost like writing an opera, if not in quality, certainly in quantity," Williams said in 2001. Listening to a complete Williams soundtrack with his subtle development of themes as fits the events on screen proves this.
But no music would survive two hours of variation if it weren't substantive to begin with, and "The Raiders March" turned out to be as resilient as Indiana himself, combined with some other fine themes in the movie. Although it lost the 1981 Academy Award to the synth-pop Vangelis score to "Chariots of Fire," Williams' orchestral creation has won the musical marathon.
Indy wouldn't be the same without it.
