What if Lucas and Spielberg had stuck to the original concept?

When they created the character, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg saw the Indiana Jones series as, broadly speaking, their answer to James Bond. In the late 70s, Spielberg had even badly wanted to direct an actual James Bond movie, but was not considered experienced enough a film maker. (Ironically, he'd probably be unaffordable today.)

Like Bond, the original template for an Indy movie was that it would be a self-contained adventure. The man in the hat would be the constant, but his love interest, prize, allies, enemies and geography would change with each outing.

If you consider only Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom, you get an idea of how the series might have gone had the Beards stuck to this pattern. However, they veered away from this, apparently for two reasons:

1) Spielberg was sensitive to the Temple of Doom backlash and reactively sought to make the third film a "return to form."
2) The frequency of the installments was slow and Spielberg was pursuing other genres. Therefore, he and Lucas approached the third film as a finale of what was now by consequence a trilogy, and that certainly colored the approach to the material. There's an effort to make things come full circle and complete a nice little package.

The result is that the films became a little bit more connected, a little bit more parts of a saga, than was probably originally intended. Last Crusade de-mystified and domesticated the character and retroactively turned elements of Raiders into series staples.

A tidy and on-the-nose (he's literally a boyscout) backstory for Indy was invented that explained his accessories, characters were reprised (Marcus and Sallah), Indy was back fighting Nazis in the desert, the artifiact was once more rooted in Christian mythology, etc. Even super-specific stuff like the cut to Indy's college after the prologue and the font of the credits became motifs. Now granted, Bond isn't completely void of mythos and you've got your mainstays like M, Q, Moneypenny etc. but by and large Last Crusade deviated the series significantly enough into a larger saga, and causes it to occupy a middle ground between Bond and something hyper-seralized like say, Lord of the Rings.

You could argue that Indy 4 was a little less concerned than Last Crusade about retreading what came before, but the 50s angle aside I'm not so sure - from Marshall College to the reprise of Marion to the reference to dead characters to the myriad of callbacks, it might be the least independent of any of the installments.

So, to the point of thread: what if that wouldn't have happened, and the series had remained in the direction it was still headed in the early 80s? What sort of adventures might we have seen had Lucas/Spielberg had more confidence and had reliably put out an Indy movie every three years after Raiders? What other antecedents could have been used as influences after Sierra Madre, Casablanca, and Gunga Din? The 30s would have continued to be a rich backstrop for compelling artifacts, villains and mythologies. And of course, the 40s would have allowed us all of Indy's WWII adventures, a super fertile stretch in the character's history that I still hope an animated series could cover some day.

Whatcha got?

On the subject of allies.......... I think the inclusion of regular characters is not a bad thing. In bond there are always the constants of M and Q or Moneypenny for instance. However I think its a mistake to make those constants a parody of themselves like they did with Marcus, Sallah and Marion. All characters that were IMO developed well in a short space of time in terms of their obvious relationship and back story or affection with Indy.

Yet when they reappeared in the sequels they were there for comedic purposes and to my mind did things and acted like we wouldn't expect from what we saw in raiders.

I think they were added to appease the audience in some way, its a usual trick thing that film makers do. I suppose its comforting in a strange way that familar faces appear. But that takes it away from the original theme that everything should stand alone and I think created probelms especially with KOTCS as they felt like they had to explain where every original character was or mention them.

Udvarnoky said:

Like Bond, the original template for an Indy movie was that it would be a self-contained adventure. The man in the hat would be the constant, but his love interest, prize, allies, enemies and geography would change with each outing.

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Too many people keep exaggerating the James Bond comparison even when it's marginal. Don't forget that 5 out of the first 7 Bond movies had the same villain (with, essentially, the same "prize").

Udvarnoky said:

If you consider only Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom, you get an idea of how the series might have gone had the Beards stuck to this pattern.

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Considering only those 2 movies, there is no "pattern". (Unless "pattern" has somehow come to mean, "difference".)

Udvarnoky said:

Whatcha got?

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I got a lot but not sure if it's worth talking about for something that's already done & dusted.

Udvarnoky said:

What other antecedents could have been used as influences after Sierra Madre, Casablanca, and Gunga Din?

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Are those 3 movies all ya got as "antecedents"?

There's no way the series was ever meant to be a franchise as prolific as James Bond.

By the time Raiders was in development, there were 11 Bond films in 17 years with three different actors playing the character.

There's no way Lucas and Spielberg had that in mind when they were crafting "Raiders."

Yes, ToD was a great second chapter in that it was a pretty big departure from its predecessor, while still being recognizably consistent with the character and his universe.

However, the Bond movies benefitted not only from a long book series ripe for adaptation but with a far more easily translatable world. It's far easier to come up with contemporary adventures in the world of espionage than pulpy stories about an occult archaeologist.

It's the reason why the subsequent movies were lacking in at least some respects. "Raiders" was sui generis. LC recycled many elements from "Raiders" and even Lucas himself thought the grail made for a pretty weak macguffin.

To quote the late, great Roger Ebert in his review of "Last Crusade" -

there was no way for Spielberg to top himself, and perhaps it is just as well that ?Last Crusade? will indeed be Indy's last film. It would be too sad to see the series grow old and thin, like the James Bond movies.

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Characters like Bond - even Batman - can be rebooted endlessly to fit the times.

Indy, though, very much belongs to a specific time and place. He was never meant to go on forever.

Stoo said:

Too many people keep exaggerating the James Bond comparison even when it's marginal.

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Yes. Bond was just one of the names they associated with the character of Indy. The recurring association is that Indiana Jones would be a "professional":

STEVEN SPIELBERG : And each cliffhanger is better than the one
before.

GEORGE LUCAS : That is the progression we have to do. It's hard
to come up with. The trouble with cliff hangers is, you get
somebody into something, you sort have to get them out in a
plausible way. A believable way, anyway. That's another important
concept of the movie — that it be totally believable. It's a
spaghetti western, only it takes place in the thirties. Or it's
James Bond and it takes place in the thirties. Except James Bond
tends to get a little outrageous at times. We're going to take
the unrealistic side of it off, and make it more like the Clint
Eastwood westerns. The thing with this is, we want to make a very
believable character. We want him to be extremely good at what he
does, as is the Clint Eastwood character or the James Bond
character. James Bond and the man with no name were very good at
what they did. They were very, fast with a gun, they were very
slick, they were very professional. They were Supermen.

STEVEN SPIELBERG : Like Mifune.

GEORGE LUCAS : Yes, like Mifune. He's a real professional. He's
really good. And that is the key to the whole thing. That's
something you don't see that much anymore.

STEVEN SPIELBERG : And one of the things that really helped
Mifune in all the Kurosawa movies is that he was always
surrounded by really inept characters, real silly buffoons, which
made him so much more majestic. If there are occasions where he
comes up against, not the arch-villain, but the people around him
shouldn't be the smartest...

GEORGE LUCAS : Well, they shouldn't be buffoons. The one thing
we're going to do is make a very good period piece, that is
realistic and believable. A thirties movie in the, even in the
Sam Spade genre. Even in the Maltese Falcon there were some
pretty goofy characters, but they were all pretty real in their
own bizarre way.

STEVEN SPIELBERG : Elijah Cook.

GEORGE LUCAS : Elijah Cook might not have been the brightest
hyphenate in the world. In a way he was the buffoon of the piece,
but at the same time he was very dangerous and he was very...
They were strong characters. If we keep it that mode of
believability...

STEVEN SPIELBERG : It's just like you don't put Lee Van Cleef as
an accomplice to... (garbled)

GEORGE LUCAS : No, you put Eli Wallich. Did you see "The Good,
The Bad And the Ugly"? The Eli Wallich character is a goofy
character, but at the same time he's very dangerous and he's very
funny and he's ... We can have that kind of thing. The main thing
is for him to be a super hero in the best sense of the word,
which is John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery tradition of a
man who we can all look up to and say, "Now there's somebody who
really knows his job. He's really good at what he does and he's a
very dangerous person. But at the same time we're putting him in
the kind of Bogart mold, like "Treasure of Sierra Madre" or...

STEVEN SPIELBERG : Or even the Clark Gable thing we talked about.

GEORGE LUCAS : Yeah, the Clark Gable mold. The fact that he is
slightly scruffy. You don't know it until it happens. Now,
several aspects that we've discussed before: The image of him
which is the strongest image is the "Treasure Of Sierra Madre"
outfit, which is the khaki pants, he's got the leather jacket,
that sort of felt hat, and the pistol and holster with a World
War One sort of flap over it. He's going into the jungle carrying
his gun. The other thing we've added to him, which may be fun, is
a bull whip. That's really his trade mark. That's really what
he's good at. He has a pistol, and he's probably very good at
that, but at the same time he happens to be very good with a bull
whip. It's really more of a hobby than anything else. Maybe he
came from Montana, someplace, and he... There are freaks who love
bull whips. They just do it all the time. It's a device that
hasn't been used in a long time.

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If this was the original concept:

GEORGE LUCAS: That's another important concept of the movie — that it be totally believable...Except James Bond tends to get a little outrageous at times. We're going to take the unrealistic side of it off, and make it more like the Clint Eastwood westerns.

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Then this is a case where they failed to stick to an original concept. Though, to be fair, the Spaghetti westerns were hardly realistic to begin with.

Stoo said:

Are those 3 movies all ya got as "antecedents"?

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Not sure what the confrontational tone is for, but these are commonly cited as stylistic (and in the case of Gunga Din, quite a bit more) influences on the first two films. My notion was that while the swashbuckling serials serve as a stylistic backbone for the series as a whole, each installment has some obvious, more specific, cinematic echoes. For Indy 4, you could name films like Earth Versus Flying Saucer, as we have for a long time. We also know that earlier incarnations of that movie would have riffed on the "man on the run" stories so popular with Hitchcock.

I was simply trying to prompt thoughts on what other films/conceits they could have mined had more installments been made that wouldn't be as necessarily limited as our Indy 5 speculation. I'm not attempting to pitch this as the most original thread concept of all time, but good golly miss molly.

Stoo said:

Considering only those 2 movies, there is no "pattern". (Unless "pattern" has somehow come to mean, "difference".)

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In our quest to observe a pattern we can arguably include some of the earlier concepts for the third movie they batted around (and put a scriptwriter to on at least two occasions) throughout the 80s before they decided to make it the series closer.

Lance Quazar said:

There's no way the series was ever meant to be a franchise as prolific as James Bond.

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That was not being put forth.

You guys are really jumping on the James Bond thing. I put the "broadly" qualifier in there for good reason, and I'm using that franchise merely as a frame of reference for a certain extreme of serialized storytelling, while also conceding that it did have recurring characters and elements. My overall point, that the series evolved considerably by the time Last Crusade was conceived, prevails. In the earliest of stages, Lucas and Spielberg clearly considered the possibility of this going on for longer than three episodes, potentially manufactured by hands other than theirs. Hell, Spielberg almost outsourced directing duties for the second movie.

Lance Quazar said:

LC recycled many elements from "Raiders" and even Lucas himself thought the grail made for a pretty weak macguffin.

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Last Crusade is decidedly more in-bred than the other installments, which could claim a far richer tapestry of influences. I thought Roger Ebert made an insightful point about the prologue being remiscent of boys' adventure magazines, but in general it seems to be looking to Raiders than outside its own saga for suggestions. We have a great thread collecting Indy4's visual homages that could be done for the first two movies with probably an equal wealth of examples. I'll bet Last Crusade would be noticeably more shallow in this regard.

Lance Quazar said:

Indy, though, very much belongs to a specific time and place. He was never meant to go on forever.

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From the cold business perspective from which films are greenlit, "meant" is irrelevant. Films are "meant" to go on for as long as they continue to make money, and that duration might greatly extend the lifespan of its creators. Also, the fact that Indy belongs to a specific time in no way precludes a reboot. There's a lot of different ways to approach the 30s.

Anyway, we're covering the reboot scenario elsewhere.

Udvarnoky said:

I was simply trying to prompt thoughts on what other films/conceits they could have mined had more installments been made that wouldn't be as necessarily limited as our Indy 5 speculation.

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Anything and everything made in the general period that Indiana Jones was initially set could have been mined.

With Gunga Din, for example, it wasn't the whole film but snippets of ideas, influences and inspirations, mixed with elements from some of the best 'jungle' serials.

There were screwball elements throughout the Indy films, so there could have been influences from Bringing Up Baby, The Thin Man series or more from The Marx Brothers.

Sooner or later Lucas and Spielberg would have mined the realm of Universal monsters, which found its way into TLC in a small way with the castle in the storm. This would have allowed Indy to investigate the 'haunted houses' proposed by Lucas.

Film noir is an obvious one. Indy in a trenchcoat hunting for answers in a dark and dangerous city.

In terms of story I see a simple skeletal framework involving a MacGuffin and some exotic or interesting locations, which was also the basis for the Bond films, and where Indy might have his closest connection with them.

Montana Smith said:

Sooner or later Lucas and Spielberg would have mined the realm of Universal monsters, which found its way into TLC in a small way with the castle in the storm. This would have allowed Indy to investigate the 'haunted houses' proposed by Lucas.

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If only that draft existed to be read... I don't know if Diane Thomas got only as far as a story treatment or a full-fledged screenpaly, but it would be fascinating to see what kind of sources Lucas had in mind to draw from. The precursors could have ranged from the most serious of Gothic horrors to the sublime camp of William Castle. The teaser in Columbus' draft approaches Scooby Doo territory.

The beautiful thing about haunted house stories is there's a version of them for every era. It's kind of like the Lost City angle, a version of which we eventually got in Indiana Jones 4. Darabont's version of "the city of gods" and the immortal Fate of Atlantis graphic adventure game are in my opinion headier attacks on the same basic idea, which has been done in a number of adventure movies, but there were a million ways to go.

There's also zombies, which that Army of the Dead novel from a few years back dealt with (and was reportedly not very good). The cancelled Iron Phoenix adventure game would have dealt with an attempt to resurrect Hitler (and was very very loosely turned into a comic). What if Indy had gone and researched Haitian zombies, a la The Serpent and the Rainbow? Wes Craven's schlocky adaptation has a lot of pleasures, but it's a disgrace to the novel, which could have been the foundation for an incredible Indiana Jones movie. I mean, it essentially reads like one already, despite being non-fiction. "White Zombie" would be the most obvious cousin in 30s cinema I can come up with.

Udvarnoky said:

If only that draft existed to be read... I don't know if Diane Thomas got only as far as a story treatment or a full-fledged screenpaly, but it would be fascinating to see what kind of sources Lucas had in mind to draw from. The precursors could have ranged from the most serious of Gothic horrors to the sublime camp of William Castle. The teaser in Columbus' draft approaches Scooby Doo territory.

The beautiful thing about haunted house stories is there's a version of them for every era.

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I love the idea of the 'haunted house'. Even if there's no actual pay-off (as in The Hound of the Baskervilles) the atmosphere generated can be long-lasting.

The Drums of Fu Manchu (1940) serial has a perfect example achieved on a very small scale:

http://raven.theraider.net/showpost.php?p=518748&postcount=104

It's the kind of story that would especially suit an older less agile Indy, i.e. a possible Indy 5. The Legend of Hell House (1973), for example, was full of menace, yet there were no action heroes required.

If it had been chosen as the basis for a film made in the 1990s we would have seen Indy's knowledge and intuition along with the physical aspect.

Udvarnoke said:

There's also zombies, which that Army of the Dead novel from a few years back dealt with (and was reportedly not very good). The cancelled Iron Phoenix adventure game would have dealt with an attempt to resurrect Hitler (and was very very loosely turned into a comic). What if Indy had gone and researched Haitian zombies, a la The Serpent and the Rainbow? Wes Craven's schlocky adaptation has a lot of pleasures, but it's a disgrace to the novel, which could have been the foundation for an incredible Indiana Jones movie. I mean, it essentially reads like one already, despite being non-fiction. "White Zombie" would be the most obvious cousin in 30s cinema I can come up with.

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White Zombie is one of those incredibly atmospheric horror films, as far from the Romero style as could be imagined. As such I would place it into the haunted house category.

Haven't seen The Serpent and the Rainbow since I recorded it from the TV onto video. Now that you mention it, I want to seek out the DVD!

I can imagine a creepy Indy horror set in the deep south (some of the best and creepiest Scooby-Doos were also set there!)

Indy vs. Romero style zombies might be a bit too post-apocalyptic, unless it was a contained outbreak, as in the Army of the Dead. But saying that I'd like to see Indy faced with Robert Neville's plight in Matheson's I Am Legend.

Heston's Omega Man (1971) had a big effect on me growing up. Indy's the kind of resourceful guy who could survive. But there's the problem that such a situation is too world changing.

Montana Smith said:

It's the kind of story that would especially suit an older less agile Indy, i.e. a possible Indy 5. The Legend of Hell House (1973), for example, was full of menace, yet there were no action heroes required.

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And you could still have classic Indy set pieces in that context, somehow. Maybe not along the lines of leaping from a horse onto a moving tank, but Temple of Doom managed to pull off the trick of memorable action sequences despite being largely subterranean. And of course, a movie that takes place in a castle for a long stretch is an invitation for terrific booby traps. I'm thinking the Three Trials sequence writ large.

And in our heads we instinctly think along the lines of Transylvania or Stuttgart for old creepy castles, but there's a metric ton of global possibilities. Himalayan Mountain Temple of Doom, anyone? (It's not like the Raven bar or the steep-gradient rafting really covered snowbound locations to any satisfying degree, whereas we've pretty much given jungles and deserts their due.)

Also as you hinted, it was high time to ramp up the film noir element again, which only Raiders truly embraced. I wouldn't have minded more femme fatale characters like Elsa, although maybe without the switcheroo thing. Alternatively, we could have eventually gotten a Sophia Hapgood type character. I've always thought that, done right, it could have been amusing if one of Indy's students ended up haplessly caught up in one of his adventures. (I'm almost positive a comic or two did this to embarassing effect.) They could have also given Indy a female sidekick who wasn't a love interest, or where the affections were one-sided.

Montana Smith said:

Haven't seen The Serpent and the Rainbow since I recorded it from the TV onto video. Now that you mention it, I want to seek out the DVD!

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It's definitely worth seeing, but run, do not walk, to your bookstore and grab Wade Davis' novel.

Udvarnoky said:

And in our heads we instinctly think along the lines of Transylvania or Stuttgart for old creepy castles, but there's a metric ton of global possibilities. Himalayan Mountain Temple of Doom, anyone? (It's not like the Raven bar or the steep-gradient rafting really covered snowbound locations to any satisfying degree, whereas we've pretty much given jungles and deserts their due.)

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And that instantly makes me think of Himmler's Ahnenerbe expedition to Tibet 1938-1939. But it's just more Nazis at a time when Indy needs to be confronting other dangers.

Not films, but places the SS were interested in.


Keeping with the snowbound element Lucas and Spielberg might have looked to The Thing From Another World (1951), as an alternative to Carpenter's The Thing (1982).

Udvarnoky said:

Also as you hinted, it was high time to ramp up the film noir element again, which only Raiders truly embraced. I wouldn't have minded more femme fatale characters like Elsa, although maybe without the switcheroo thing. We could have eventually gotten a Sophia Hapgood type character. Also, Indy could have had female sidekicks who weren't love interests. I've also thought that, done right, it could have been amusing if one of Indy's students ended up haplessly caught up in one of his adventures. (I'm almost positive a comic or two did this to embarassing effect.)

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Film noir is the big, largely untapped Indy resource. It could easily be combined with The Thin Man to add some wry, intelligent humour, since comic relief is a pre-requisite for the series.

The post-teaser, pre-Peru stuff in Darabont's Indy 4 demonstrates the value of this proposition marvelously, in my opinion.

The Deep South has merit, but I don't want an Indy adventure that puts him primarily in the States. In fact, I'd liked to have seen another movie that took Temple's example and didn't have Indy set one foot on American soil. The throw to Marshall College needs to be relieved of its duties. (Or would they further enhance the confusion by having him at Barnett again?)

Udvarnoky said:

The Deep South has merit, but I don't want an Indy adventure that puts him primarily in the States. In fact, I'd liked to have seen another movie that took Temple's example and didn't have Indy set one foot on American soil. The throw to Marshall College needs to be relieved of its duties. (Or would they further enhance the confusion by having him at Barnett again?)

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I can even see the Deep South in danger of becoming a re-run of Temple itself. I have this picture in my mind of Indy dressing up for dinner in a big old colonial house among the swamps, and the table talk turning to rumours of strange occurrences and sightings in the vicinity. Before long Indy's conducting some nocturnal investigations leading to the discovery of an underground mine worked by zombies!

However, we could get away with it if the over-riding theme was a film noir set in a Deep South town and among the surrounding swamps and plantations. Maybe a steamy Deep South in summer with a sultry femme fatale or two.

Still, a single setting could become claustrophobic. Indy would need to be somewhere foreign and exotic first.

Make the bayou adventure the teaser, and the main story the exotic haunted house. You just need the most tenuous of links between them!

The problem is, Indy already got the Holy Grail. When you've gotten the literal Holy Grail, where else can you go but down? What artifact(s) could ever hope to measure up to the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant? And remember, Indy movies are wrapped around the MacGuffin, they're driven by it--What would be the MacGuffin in a Noir Indy or a Haunted House Indy?

Also...Does the MacGuffin HAVE to be supernatural? Can it perhaps be something man-made, but still "magical" in the sense of being incredibly dangerous and destructive in the wrong hands?

For example, would a "Doomsday Device" invented by the Nazis which Indy has to go hunting for to stop the last remnant of Nazis or Neo-Nazis from attaining, suffice? Set it say circa 1960 or something...Bring Indy back to Europe. Make the tone similar to that of From Russia With Love or Soldier of Fortune. Perhaps the power of the Doomsday Device could've been mined from some supernatural source, but it'd be a man-made object, devised by Hitler in the last desperate days of World War II to be his ace in the hole; lost with the Soviet onslaught in Berlin...

Raiders112390 said:

The problem is, Indy already got the Holy Grail. When you've gotten the literal Holy Grail, where else can you go but down? What artifact(s) could ever hope to measure up to the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant? And remember, Indy movies are wrapped around the MacGuffin, they're driven by it--What would be the MacGuffin in a Noir Indy or a Haunted House Indy?

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I don't care about the Ark, lingam, the Holy Grail or Crystal Skulls, but Indy and his rivals do and that's all that matters.

I'm with Lucas on the point that the MacGuffin is "...the main driving force of the movie...the object of everybody's search". But not that "...the audience should care about it almost as much as the duelling heroes and villains on-screen..."

How many non-Hindus, for example, connected with the Sankara Stones?

It just has to be important enough to the characters to motivate them into making choices and committing to action.

In plenty of 'noir' films and serials the MacGuffin is a piece of information or a formula that's of vital importance to both sides. It could mean life or death on a personal level, or on a global scale in the case of the Second World War.

With an Indy film the MacGuffin really is a pointless artefact, since the powerful ones are either lost or hidden so they can't have a lasting effect on the world.

With a haunted house the MacGuffin might be the object that determines survival, escape or the destruction of an entity threatening to unleash it's will on those beyond the house.

Udvarnoky said:

In our quest to observe a pattern we can arguably include some of the earlier concepts for the third movie they batted around (and put a scriptwriter to on at least two occasions) throughout the 80s before they decided to make it the series closer.

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Well, you did say "only" the first 2 movies.

Following their established *non-linear pattern*, the timeframe could've continued to go backwards, putting Indy 3 in 1934, before "Temple of Doom". Unlike "Crusade" & "Skull", the font used for the opening credits could have been completely different than the typefaces of "Raiders" (so "Doom" wouldn't be the oddball) and the title could've been something else besides a generic, INDIANA JONES AND THE...

Udvarnoky said:

Not sure what the confrontational tone is for, but these are commonly cited as stylistic (and in the case of Gunga Din, quite a bit more) influences on the first two films. My notion was that while the swashbuckling serials serve as a stylistic backbone for the series as a whole, each installment has some obvious, more specific, cinematic echoes. For Indy 4, you could name films like Earth Versus Flying Saucer, as we have for a long time. We also know that earlier incarnations of that movie would have riffed on the "man on the run" stories so popular with Hitchcock.

I was simply trying to prompt thoughts on what other films/conceits they could have mined had more installments been made that wouldn't be as necessarily limited as our Indy 5 speculation. I'm not attempting to pitch this as the most original thread concept of all time, but good golly miss molly.

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Gotcha. If "cinematic echoes" as antecedants are what you're aiming for, then Georgie & Stevie could've tried a tragic story about mental disorder and romance gone wrong (both fairly common traits in films of the '40s).

---
THE INNER DEMONS OF INDIANA JONES

Paramount logo dissolves into a pyramid-shaped house of cards. It is knocked down by a frustrated Indiana Jones, who sits alone brooding in his den wearing only underpants and socks. He cringes, holds his head in pain, grabs a mickey of Johnnie Walker Black Label and staggers upstairs.

New York State - 1934

Professor Jones continually rejects the advances that females make upon him. The women are never ideal so he chooses not to become involved, that is until a new employee gets hired to the college staff. This secretary, who has just moved to Fairfield from out west with her domineering husband, has a fear of meeting new people and doesn't feel at ease in these unfamiliar surroundings. Despite her being many years younger and married, Indiana Jones relentlessly pursues the timid typist and they soon begin having a clandestine affair. He refuses the idea of meeting at his own home so their carnal trysts take place in various, discreet spots in order to avoid peering eyes and gossip of the small town.

Indy tells her about the past fifteen year of his life, about becoming lonely and growing detached from his father after his beloved mother was violently killed in front of his eyes during a freak accident on an amusement ride at Steeplechase Park on Coney Island. He also relates how his father suffered a mental collapse from grief and eventually poisoned himself to death by regularly drinking bottles of black ink. Indy quickly gains the wedded woman's sympathy and they both declare their undying love for each other.

One dark and stormy night, Indy's doorbell rings. It is his lover. The sex-starved secretary had been struck by her spouse after a confrontation regarding her fidelity and begs desperately to be let in, which Indy nervously allows. While he mixes a pair of scotch & sodas, terrible moaning is heard from upstairs. Indy tells his mistress to stay put while he investigates the haunting cry. She pours herself a second drink while biding the time and comes to notice identical images of herself in several family photographs. She looks exactly like Indy's dead mother!

Meanwhile, Indiana stares into a mirror, weeping profusely and holding his head in pain once again. He grabs his bullwhip from a hook on the wall and enters the bedroom closet, shutting himself in.

The young lady, astonished and unable to control her curiosity, sneaks upstairs to look for Indy, finding him nowhere but still hearing the muffled howls emanating from above the ceiling. They become increasingly louder. She opens the closet door and sees a ladder leading to the entrance of an attic. The cries have now turned into frantic, horrifying screeches! With liquor still in hand, the frightened but determined typist climbs up into the dark opening and peers through the gloomy din, its musty air filled with the shrilling racket of a thousand screams.

Lightning suddenly flashes outside the attic window to reveal an old woman, chained to a bed by one ankle, who is being strangled with a whip by her dear paramour!

"Die, mother, die!" Indy thunders in demented madness as he then smothers the struggling form with a moldy pillow. "I found a new you! And she's not a raving lunatic! So die, you sick, pathetic hag!"

Witnessing this moment of depravity is more than any human mind can bear. The secretary smashes her scotch & soda against the rafters and slashes her wrist with a shard of glass. These two women, the loves of Indy's life, both die simultaneously leaving the deranged doctor to stand alone in an unbroken silence.

Consumed by raging insanity and overwhelmed with extreme sorrow, the man throws himself crashing through the unopened window and lands directly on a spiked fence which circles the yard. He quivers uncontrollably, impaled through the neck and torso, barely alive. Another crackling lightning bolt connects with the metal rod that protrudes from Indy's bloody chest and renders his twitching body aflame. Rain begins to fall and the professor of archaeology is soon nothing more than a limp, smoking, twisted mass of burnt flesh.

After a few minutes pass, a brown fedora floats down from the sky, carried softly by swirling winds of the subsiding storm. With remarkable and uncanny exactness, it settles gently upon the smoldering head. Glittering wisps of gold, pixie dust begin to surround the lifeless corpse and this magical hat supernaturally summons Dr. Jones back to life...as a changed man.

"It's a Holy miracle. I'm free of my demon," whispers Indiana to himself. "From now on, I promise to sleep with as many women as possible!"

The clouds part, the sun rises and heavenly angels sing.

THE END
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There'd be no need for globe-trotting because it could've been an adventure of the soul's darkest secrets. No need for an artifact because enlightenment & balance of mind could've been the prize.

Is this the type of cinematic echoes you were looking for?