Last night I watched Secret of the Incas (1954) – the DVD copy I’d ordered finally came in. I’ve been curious about this for quite a while because it’s been argued that Charlton Heston’s character Harry Steele in the movie is supposed to be the direct inspiration for Indiana Jones, especially the costume:
Throughout Secret of the Incas, the main character, Harry Steele, can be seen wearing what would later become known as the “Indiana Jones” outfit: brown leather jacket, fedora, tan pants, an over-the-shoulder bag, and revolver
It’s true – he even has the trademark stubble (said to be rare for a leading man in a 1958 film). All he’s missing is the whip, and maybe Marion Ravenwood.
Raiders’ costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis noted that the inspiration for Indiana’s costume was Charlton Heston’s Harry Steele in Secret of the Incas: “We did watch this film together as a crew several times, and I always thought it strange that the filmmakers did not credit it later as the inspiration for the series”
There are other things that are similar – you’ve got Steele (who’s not an archaeologist, but an "adventurer and kind of a con man) facing off against rival fortune hunter Ed Morgan (played by Thomas Mitchell, one of those character actors you know by sight, but not by name. He was Scarlett O’Hara’s father in Gone with the Wind and Uncle Billy in It’s a Good Life.), and the two of them are constantly taking or threatening to take things from each other, like Indy and Belloq. In fact, you can understand what Spielberg nd Lucas were trying to do with Indy by watching the interplay of Steele and Morgan. The problem is that Steele is definitely morally ambiguous, while you never doubted that Indy was straight-up honest. Despite Belloq’s line, you never felt that it would only take a little change in fortune to make Indy like him.
There’s also a scene in a tomb where a shaft of sunlight going through a one-of-a-kind artifact reveals where a treasure is hidden (and there’s even a model of the room to show how it’s used, as with the “Map Room” in Raiders of the Lost Arc. Has anything like this EVER existed in ANY culture?).
Like a lot of people, I assumed that Indiana Jones’ garb was based on that of Roy Chapman Andrews, paleontologist (not archaeologist) who went hunting in Mongolia and found protoceratops fossils and the first-ever discovered dinosaur eggs (not believed to be from another dinosaur, not proroceratops). Later on he was president of the American Museum of Natural History. (He also wrote several books about his adventures that I read as a kid)Between trucking off into the desert wilderness and his dressing in the leather jacket and fedora he seemed the perfect model, but apparently they never even discussed him at the Raiders conceptualizing meetings.
I don’t think Raiders was drawn wholly from this film. The episodic structure undoubtedly derives from the cheaply-made chapter plays that were a standard of lots of studios – movie serials, that is. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” simply improved them by using ba MUCH bigger budget and taking out all the “TUne in Next Week” announcements, letting you see the hero get himself out of the latest predicament immediately, rather than in another week.
But I think the biggest influence was Carl Barks’ “Uncle Scrooge” stories. Barks sent his duck heroes off into distant lands in search of treasures. I wrote a piece about is in our sadly defunct e-zine Teemings, entitled “Only the Penitent Duch Shall Pass”. I point out that each of the first three Indiana Jones movies has one or more images that seem to be drawn from the 1959 Uncle Scrooge story “THe Prize of Pizarro” (other reviewers have also pointed out the similarity to Uncle Scrooge, but they choose a different story. This one’s the Real McCoy) – the giant rolling stone boulder, the deadly blade that almost hops their heads off (but they’re ducks, so they’re too short), the Chasm of the Leap for Life, and the tunnel that fills with water that they run to desperately escape, jinking sideways as soo as they exit the tunnel to leave a spout of pressurized water to shoot out of the gap.
I blame the lack of success in the later Indiana Jones series o the m NOT taking scenes from this story. Or any other Uncle Scrooge story, for that matter. Looking like CHarlton Heston can only take you so far.
