One of the most iconic moments in Raiders of the Lost Ark sees Indy facing a swordsman with ostentatious choreography. Indy just shoots the guy and moves on. This wasn’t in the original script. Initially, Indy was supposed to use his whip to yank the sword out of the guy’s hand, but since the entire cast and crew was sick from a bad case of food poisoning during the shoot in Tunisia, Harrison Ford suggested simply "shooting the sucker," to cut down on how long it would take to film. Steven Spielberg loved the idea and decided to use

As the children who have grown up loving Indy have aged, so too has their ability to peel away at some of the series' racially problematic elements. One of these elements is the insensitive makeup jobs of various characters, seen in set-pieces like the bar gunfight in Nepal and the Cairo ch

Watching the movie again, what stood out to me is how you're barefoot for so much of the movie - including places that would really hurt in real life, like burning sand and rough rocks. How was that to film? Because that definitely looks like a challe

Swelter tries hard to be an edgy contemporary Western , but it falls very, very short of its goal. This heist film stars Lennie James as a former professional thief turned small-town sheriff who is hunted down by his former breth

The script for Raiders of the Lost Ark story Guide Ark went through various different drafts, in which a number of scenes and concepts came and went. A lot of those ideas would later be reused in the second movie (which was technically a prequel ), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom . These include Indy traveling the Shanghai and avoiding machine gun fire by hiding behind a gong and a high-speed chase on mine carts. Originally, in Raiders , the trip to Shanghai was to recover a piece of the Staff of Ra and the mine cart pursuit followed the opening of the

Instead, the filmmakers used Mexican Redknees tarantulas for two possible reasons. First, they're native to Mexico, which is closer in geography. Second, Mexican Redknees are very docile spiders that rarely bite or kick up a fuss, making them much easier to han

Comparing the before and after shots reveals the well-hidden mistake. In the before shot, the dead driver accelerates the truck towards an obvious dead-end full of buildings on a cramped street. In the next shot, it has somehow turned a corner and emptied into a large open area, where the explosion is triggered. It's a bizarre mistake that somehow got left in, with no pickup shot between takes that would explain the discrepa

Steven Spielberg has been revered by film buffs and casual moviegoers alike since his directing career begin in the ‘70s. Bursting onto the scene with his first breakout hit Jaws in 1975, effectively birthing the summer blockbuster (for better or for worse), Spielberg has continued to revolutionize Hollywood filmmaking for deca

Raiders is no exception to the famous director's love for powerful imagery. Though the story features some logical leaps, they're accepted in order to appreciate the magic happening in the story. For example, the incredible image of the snakes in the Well of the Souls is profound but raises questions of how they survived for so long with little oxygen or food. Other examples include the (supposed) 5 ft tall staff of Ra towering over Ford's 6'1 frame in the map room or Indy and Marion's unexplained escape from the Nazis' remote island at

In the temple in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark , little hieroglyphs of R2-D2 and C-3PO can be seen engraved on the wall . They can also be seen engraved on a golden pillar in the Well of Souls. This could just be seen as a fun Easter egg. But on top of that, the use of R2-D2 and C-3PO as hieroglyphs also seems to suggest that those droids actually went on their cosmic adventures a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away , and the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises take place in the same unive

In The Ten Commandments , which bombed in theatres , Molina breathes life into Ramses, who was Pharaoh during the days of Moses. While God challenges Ramses to free the Hebrews, Moses receives messages from Heaven that culminate with his titular tabl

The Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies opens with Rudolf Abel, technically the film’s antagonist, looking at himself in the mirror in his cramped New York apartment. As the camera pans out, we realize he’s trying to capture all of his own features in a self-portrait he’s painting. In a matter of seconds, Spielberg establishes that this is a mild-mannered man with a solitary existe

It's possible this fellow was sleeping on the job, but the deleted scenes tell a different story. As Indy exits the small hole in the temple, he encounters and subsequently intimidates a guard waiting outside. The man backs down in fear and collapses to the ground. While this scene was cut from the film, the slumping man was not, resulting in another innocuous g