King Kong and Marion Ravenwood

ATMachine

Member
I've been reading through Lawrence Kasdan's first-draft script of Raiders (all hail Moedred for tracking that down!) and one thing jumped out at me.

In the early version the Belloq character doesn't give Marion a new dress, so she's not running around barefoot in a torn dress during the Well of Souls sequence. Instead, Marion's big costume change comes on the Bantu Wind, when she slips into a long white nightgown. Kasdan's first introduction of it describes Marion's nightgown as follows: "...the long, snow-white, high-necked nightgown she is wearing. It is very prim. Very innocent. And very sexy."

Over the remainder of the movie, her nightgown gradually disintegrates, getting ever more tattered and stained. It takes some damage during the submarine ride, and then much more during the opening of the Ark. (Which is immediately followed by the mine-cart chase that was later recycled in TOD.) But Marion keeps on wearing the increasingly torn nightgown almost until the very final scene of the film; she gets a decent outfit again only once she's back in Washington, DC.

The idea of putting Marion in a damaged white dress in the finale, as opposed to during the Well of Souls scene, probably has its roots in George Lucas's 1974 rough draft of The Star Wars. Princess Leia's costume was always going to be the white Madonna dress of the final film, but in the earliest script it got severely damaged by the finale. So much so that apparently Leia wound up barefoot and bare-breasted, like the False Maria/Whore of Babylon during the famous dance scene in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

I suspect a similar cinematic reference was talking place with Marion's clothing damage in the early script. Certainly Kasdan's description of the conservative cut of Marion's nightgown evokes the Madonna outfit Leia wears in Star Wars. But instead of Metropolis' Whore of Babylon, the probable cinematic reference in the case of the damaged nightgown would be King Kong.

In the original script, when Belloq/Victor Lovar opens the Ark inside a tent, Marion is just outside, tied spread-eagled to two posts. When Lovar and the Nazis are killed by the power of God, Marion's nightgown is reduced to tatters.

In King Kong, Fay Wray is likewise tied spread-eagled to two posts by the natives of Skull Island as a sacrifice for Kong, whom they revere as a god. Later in the film, Kong peels off bits of her clothing, leaving her in a torn and tattered dress.

wray.jpg


So, Marion was going to be disrobed by an act of God, rather like Fay Wray (only in a much more literal sense).

Fay Wray's torn dress after her encounter with Kong hangs off of one shoulder, much as, I suspect, Marion's nightgown would by the end of the script. After all, Kasdan describes the nightgown initially as "high-necked," which kind of implies that it would get much lower-necked later on.

In fact, in most of the original concept art for King Kong, Fay Wray's character isn't wearing a bra, leaving her with one breast exposed after Kong rips her dress. As I noted above, the rough-draft script for The Star Wars apparently featured similar nudity (as did that of Willow, for that matter). So I suspect that Lucas originally wanted Marion in the finale to have at least one bare breast. After all, she probably wouldn't wear a brassiere under her nightgown.

In the final film this was toned down for family audiences, but instead (by way of compensation?) Marion ends up barefoot in the Well of Souls snake pit, which didn't happen in the early drafts.

Also, there's the matter of Marion's hair color. The Raiders storyboards of artists David Negron and Ed Verreaux all depict Marion with brown or black hair. However, their storyboards date from relatively late in the writing process, as they incorporate the idea that Belloq gives Marion a dress (which was still absent in the revised third draft).

Earlier storyboards by famed Rocketeer artist Dave Stevens show Marion as a blonde. In this particular image, Stevens has drawn Marion and Indy escaping the Well of Souls--but, as per the early script, Marion is wearing a leather jacket.

DaveStevensRaidersStoryboard.jpg


Quite likely Lucas originally did envision Marion as blonde. In the Raiders story conferences, Lucas and Spielberg discuss making her look like Marlene Dietrich or Veronica Lake, both famous Old Hollywood blondes. But, of course, Marion being blonde would also give her a definite resemblance to Fay Wray in King Kong.

The first draft also gives Marion a line of dialogue to Indy that was cut later on: "You know what you did to me, to my life? You see what I am today. This is your handiwork. Do you know how many men I've known since you?"

Which confirms that A) yes, 25-year-old Indiana Jones did have sex with a fifteen-year-old Marion (ugh), and B) Marion worked as a prostitute in Nepal. The latter element is undoubtedly borrowed from the Whore of Babylon imagery associated with Princess Leia in the 1974 rough draft of The Star Wars.

By the way, as I noted in passing above, in the first draft Belloq's name is actually Victor Lovar. This may have been a bit too on-the-nose, given the way he hits on Marion (as it sounds like both lover and lothario).
 

Montana Smith

Active member
Interesting post, ATM. (y)

I love the connections there are between things, and where ideas spring from.

Raiders, Star Wars, Metropolis and King Kong - that's super-team of heavy-hitters!
 

kongisking

Active member
Now, I love anything Kong, and get a delighted shiver whenever I see someone other than me bring up the big lug...but this is a bizarre post. Having your heroine put in a sexy garment that falls apart as the movie plays out is probably all over the place in fiction. Because....hey, gotta show off that divine female figure somehow. :p
 

Finn

Moderator
Staff member
kongisking said:
Having your heroine put in a sexy garment that falls apart as the movie plays out is probably all over the place in fiction.
Yeah, it's a thing. (The page contains the King Kong reference, and also... a slightly surprising one to Indy.)

One form of fan myopia, and a very common at that, is to think every little similarity between two fictional works is an intentional homage by the latter one - while in reality, some story elements just are relatively common and therefore easily recycled. What sets this one apart however is the apparent detail in it - it does appear more than a simple coincidence. It's good to keep in mind though that it discusses a possible homage that was ultimately scrapped from the final product, making said detail slightly redundant. Still, it is an interesting observation - what could have been, so to speak.
 

Moedred

Administrator
Staff member
I'm pretty sure that semi-nude design for Princess Leia harkens to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Princess Dejah of the Mars books, especially as depicted by Frank Frazetta. In the featurette of Lucas scribbling Phantom Menace in 1994, you can see this on his bookshelf.
 

ATMachine

Member
Moedred said:
I'm pretty sure that semi-nude design for Princess Leia harkens to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Princess Dejah of the Mars books, especially as depicted by Frank Frazetta. In the featurette of Lucas scribbling Phantom Menace in 1994, you can see this on his bookshelf.
Oh, definitely--and even more so for Leia's slave outfit in ROTJ. But Dejah Thoris in the Barsoom books just walks around mostly-naked all the time, and so does everybody else. Whereas Lucas seemingly wanted in the early Star Wars script to have Leia transform on screen in explicitly Freudian terms from virgin to whore, along the lines of the saintly Maria and her seductive counterpart, the False Maria, in Metropolis.

I didn't mention it earlier, but the reason the SW rough draft's Leia ends up half-naked is because it's apparently meant to be implied she was gang-raped off screen. :sick: Which seems to be where the idea of Marion working as a prostitute in Nepal came from. And in the Raiders rough draft, Marion describes her nightgown as making her feel like a "virgin bride"--going back to that Freudian Madonna/whore dichotomy.
 
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kongisking

Active member
ATMachine said:
Oh, definitely--and even more so for Leia's slave outfit in ROTJ. But Dejah Thoris in the Barsoom books just walks around mostly-naked all the time, and so does everybody else. Whereas Lucas seemingly wanted in the early Star Wars script to have Leia transform on screen in explicitly Freudian terms from virgin to whore, along the lines of the saintly Maria and her seductive counterpart, the False Maria, in Metropolis.

I didn't mention it earlier, but the reason the SW rough draft's Leia ends up half-naked is because it's apparently meant to be implied she was gang-raped off screen. :sick: Which seems to be where the idea of Marion working as a prostitute in Nepal came from. And in the Raiders rough draft, Marion describes her nightgown as making her feel like a "virgin bride"--going back to that Freudian Madonna/whore dichotomy.

With all that in mind...George was probably beside himself with perverse glee when he came up with the idea of retconning Leia to be Luke's sister, even after laying heavy romantic tension between them. Dude's got a deviant side... :p
 

ATMachine

Member
Another connection between Raiders and SW: In all the various versions of Kasdan's script, when Toht/Belzig comes into Belloq's tent in Tanis, he's holding not a coat hanger, but a black leather case, presumably full of torture implements.

The Raiders story conferences reveal that Lucas wanted to suggest that Marion was tortured by her captors. This seems to be another idea taken from Princess Leia in Star Wars.

In the third-draft script of SW, Leia is described as "bloody and mutilated" when the heroes rescue her. As best I can tell, Lucas's sources for this idea were Toshiro Mifune's bruise makeup in Yojimbo, as well as (surprisingly) CS Lewis's Narnia book The Horse and His Boy. Apparently Lucas initially wanted a pretty bad bruise makeup on Leia--swollen-shut eye, broken nose, and even a missing tooth or two.

Like the early Marion, at that point Leia was envisioned as a blonde. So, as with the damaged white dress, Lucas may have wanted to recycle the bruise-makeup idea with Marion in Raiders, by having the Nazis torture her. (He also apparently tried to reuse this idea in the early script for Willow.)

Kasdan's script doesn't mention Marion being visibly injured, but we're left on the page with the implication that Toht may have tortured her. Spielberg, on the other hand, played the scene for comedy in the final film, having Toht unveil a coat-hanger in a gag that was recycled from 1941.

If Marion had been beaten up, as per Lucas's initial idea, she'd likely have had the same injuries as the early Leia, and those bruises would probably have lingered for the rest of the film. And in the final scene in Washington, we'd likely see her with a crookedly healed nose--as well as perhaps a gold tooth, reflecting her newfound wealth from the US government payout. (A similar disfigurement was apparently mooted for the heroine in Willow in early drafts.)

But again, given that Kasdan was careful to leave what happens in Belloq's tent ambiguous, it's clear that even if Lucas considered this idea at one point, he definitely didn't want to be nailed down to it. Having Marion still look pretty when she's running around in a torn nightgown would be nice, after all.
 

ATMachine

Member
Actually, as the story conferences show, Lucas's first idea for the heroine of Raiders was a blonde Marlene Dietrich type: a German nightclub singer in Cairo who is the mistress of a Nazi officer. Of course, she'd also be attracted to Indy, and would ultimately end up on the side of the good guys by the finale (the reverse of Elsa in Last Crusade).

That was probably the version of Marion that got visibly beaten up. In the early drafts of Willow, the heroine Sorsha was apparently likewise disfigured. Both Sorsha and the early Marion start out as villains and end as heroines.

And the disfigurement via torture of proto-Marion may actually have been worse than I supposed above: in the early concept for Willow it seems Sorsha lost an eye.
 

ATMachine

Member
If I'm right about Lucas mentally tossing around the idea of Marion as a German double agent who is disfigured by Nazi torture, it would've had cinematic precedent--in Fritz Lang's 1953 film noir The Big Heat.

In that film Gloria Grahame (a famous onscreen blonde) plays the mistress of a gangster. After she flirts with the protagonist, a policeman, her jealous criminal boyfriend throws boiling hot coffee in her face, permanently disfiguring her.

In the original Raiders story concept, as I noted above, Marion was the mistress of a Nazi officer. She becomes romantically involved with Indy, after which the Nazis begin to question her loyalty.

By the time of Kasdan's first draft, if Lucas had ever considered scarring Marion, he had dropped the idea once her final character and personality emerged.
 
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