Steven Spielberg

Mr. Spielberg is, to put it mildly, kind of a big deal.

Other directors gaze longingly at his resume and hope that maybe one day they'll put one together that's one-tenth as cool. In Hollywood terms, he's the total package: directing incredibly popular crowd-pleasers and serious artistic statements seemingly at will, and sometimes both at the same time. His movies read like a resume of classics: Jaws, E.T., Jurassic Park Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, and Minority Report, just to name a few. Raiders has an honored place in that company, and reflects the same sensibilities that helped make him a household name.

Growing Up Spielberg

Spielberg grew up in New Jersey and Arizona, and was the child of divorce. He blamed his father for the split (wrongly, he later claimed), and grew up lonely and bullied for being Jewish. But don't worry: like a lot of his films, there's a happy ending. He was nuts for the movies, to the point of making 8mm films as a kid (and charging admission for people to see them). His mom aided and abetted his burgeoning fascination with movies by letting him trash the house if necessary for his special effects. She told an interviewer, "I told Steve, if I'd known how famous he was going to be, I'd have had my uterus bronzed" (source).

Spielberg went to school at Long Beach State with the goal of becoming a filmmaker. Luckily, he wasn't just studying. He made a short movie called Amblin, which he parlayed into a gig directing TV shows for Universal Pictures. (The most famous was an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery, featuring Joan Crawford in full-bore career free-fall. He was 21. Twenty-one.) In 1971, he made Duel, a TV movie about a cross-country driver menaced by a big-rig truck. It was so impressive that they eventually released it in theaters. Four years later, at the age of 26 (twenty-six!), he directed Jaws, which became the highest-grossing movie of all time, as well as scaring the crap out of a generation of beachgoers.

He hasn't looked back yet.

Bringing Fun Back to Movies

Early critics didn't care for Steve's crowd-pleasing ways, claiming that he was too light and fluffy to be taken seriously. That tends to happen when you make heart-warming movies about aliens from outer space that gross a kajillion-zillion dollars at the box office. But those critics forgot that he was actually rebelling against the kind of grim, angst-ridden movies that dominated theaters in the mid-1970s.

America at the time was dealing with Vietnam and Nixon's resignation; the economy was in the tank and gas cost more than the cars getting fueled. The movies reflected that darkness—and how. Everything was serious, everything was downbeat, and everything had morally compromised heroes who sometimes failed spectacularly. Movies like Chinatown and The Exorcist dominated the box office and as great as they were, they didn't exactly make for a fun night out. (Seriously, try enjoying your dinner after watching Linda Blair puke green soup all over everyone.)

Then came Spielberg (and Lucas, who was kind of his partner in crime on this one).

Their movies reminded people to have a little fun, to enjoy themselves, and to maybe forget their troubles for a couple of hours instead of just wallowing in them. From Jaws came Star Wars and Close Encounters, and from them came Raiders… the perfect way of reminding grown-ups what it felt like to be a kid.

Becoming an Artist

Despite his early success, Spielberg still struggled to shake off the lightweight badge. It took twelve more years of experimenting with more serious efforts like The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun before he finally got that monkey off his back. Schindler's List, which recounted the true story of a German industrialist who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, earned him untold accolades, a couple of Oscars, and a movie that still serves as one of the best films about Nazi Germany's attempted extermination of the Jews.

Spielberg actually took all that attention and did something great with it: establishing the Shoah Foundation, which records the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and makes them available to the whole world.

After Schindler, Spielberg worked hard to maintain his newfound reputation for serious filmmaking. But he didn't stop with the popcorn stuff either. The same years as Schindler, he directed Jurassic Park, which set the record for the highest-grossing film of all time. (For those keeping score at home, it was the third time a Spielberg movie did that, along with Jaws and E.T.) That was followed by serious movies like Lincoln, light entertainment like War of the Worlds, and movies like Minority Report that seemed to do a little of both.

The Raiders Connection

People actually compare Raiders to Schindler's List when charting the course of Spielberg's creative development. Both films deal with the Nazis and their atrocities, but Schindler's List is presented as a matter of history. This happened, it says, and it was awful. Spielberg sticks as closely as possible to the details of the Schindler case in order to impart the way it all went down.

Raiders deals with the same issues, but presented in more of a fictional context. The Nazis are stealing a revered Jewish artifact to use for their own nefarious purposes, and Indy more or less pounds them senseless. (And strictly speaking, God himself gets in on that action too: descending from Heaven in a literal deus ex machina to smite the bad guys with holy fire.)

That's not a criticism.

Raiders was supposed to be largely fun and games, so it's going to be less serious, but Spielberg's anger at the Nazis and the eventual artistic maturity he found with Schindler's List had its seeds in this one. He goes from a great adventure story touching on this part of history to an actual examination of what happened. The second film might not have happened without the first.

It's what we've come to expect from this director: reigning king of the cinematic age and someone who knows the value of a hero in a snazzy hat.