At the time Temple of Doom came out, Spielberg said in an interview that the intention was all future Indy movies were going to be about the occult. Then there was a lot of negative reaction to that aspect of the movie, and they quietly went back to Nazis.
RE: The whole ‘Marion and Indy Relationship’
Young girls fall in love with older men all the time. Doesn’t mean they are boinking. She coulda had a massive crush on him and he broke her tiny teen-aged heart. No sex need be involved.
Get yer minds outta the gutter! 
Certainly the dialogue seems to imply they slept together.
Marion: I’ve learned to hate you in the last ten years!
Indiana: I never meant to hurt you.
Marion: I was a child. I was in love. It was wrong and you knew it!
Indiana: You knew what you were doing.
Marion: Now I do. This is my place. Get out!
Re Marion’s"child" quote, I always took it to mean she was calling herself immature. Indy responds with “you knew what you were doing”, hardly a good answer if she really was underaged.
I was thinking the same thing when I was rewatching the government agent scene linked above. It’s a minor 5-minute bit and those guys nailed it.
Huh. I’ve seen the movie many times but I never took that exchange to mean that she was literally a child, as in a prepubescent. I just read it as she was saying she wasn’t as grown up/mature or as worldly as Jones. Karen Allen would have been 30 at the time so if they had a relationship ten+ years ago that would put her 18-20. (Yes I know the actors’ ages aren’t always the same as their characters, but it’s not like she looked 22…)
I wonder how many “top men” they went through before they finally decided to just crate it up and “lose” it.
Several prominent scientists whose last words were something about “ancient superstitions” and “pseudoscientific woo” dropping dead tend to dampen the enthusiasm for continuing research.
I’ve mentioned before that I saw this film as a sneak preview. My friend was the projectionist, and he invited me and another friend to see it (it might even have been free). I had no idea what I was about to experience…
So…
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For favorite scene: When I saw the movie the first time, Indy shooting the swordsman was the most unexpected and enjoyable scene. But, upon multiple watchings, the surprise factor obviously wears off, and other, little scenes bubble up. I particularly like when Toht reveals his nunchuck-like coat hanger to Marion.
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Best Quote: Once agin, so many great snippets, but this is one of my favorites:
“You want to talk to God? Let’s go see him together. I’ve got nothing better to do.”
of course, I do say “Top. Men.” way more often.
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What aged the best? All of it.
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What aged the worst? Oh, probably the student trying to seduce Indy, but that’s a quibble.
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Unanswerable questions: Was the sand in the Ark the remains of the Ten Commandments?
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Apex: Karen Allen.
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Who won the movie? Top. Men.
Yeah, many years ago 14-year old babysitter mooned over me incessantly. It was very disturbing.
You call that Archeology???
I was referring specifically to the transcript of the discussion; Kasden notes the need to have a pre-existing relationship and some kind of conflict that kept them apart, and then Lucas jumps in with:
“Had an affair with her when she was eleven.”
with Speilberg following up with
“And promiscuous. She came onto him,”
and then Lucas responding:
“Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met.”
In that exchange, Kasden just appears to be approaching it as a characterization problem when Lucas really doing the heavy lifting as an creep and Spielberg spurring him on. To what extent who was responsible for the ultimate content of the script is unclear (screenwriters often get credited for lines or whole scenes that were inserted by a director or producer) but at least insofar as that exchange it appears to be Lucas who is enthralled with Indy having a relationship with a barely pubescent girl.
Regardless, we can agree that it is a bit of unnecessary characterization that has not aged well even though in the era in which the film is set a twenty-something year old man having a romantic/sexual relationship with a fifteen year old girl would not have been out of the norm, and that it is pretty clear that even within the film Marion’s father took issue with it. Indiana Jones, of course, is not any kind of paragon of virtue, archeological or otherwise.
It is pretty clear that whatever relationship they had was more than a one-sided juvenile crush. Marcus Brody and Jones discuss her while he’s packing, with Brody telling Jones, “Marion is the least of your worries,” presaging that the interpersonal dynamics that Indy was concerned with were less of an issue than the threat of the Nazis and existential hazard of the Ark.
William Hootkins and Don Fellows, both character actors with extensive resumes. It’s a quiet bit but as others have noted provides the key exposition for viewers to basically understand the stakes as well as set up the penultimate scene and downfall of Belloq.
She’s quite right but it is hardly a novel observation. There are many films in which the ostensible protagonist has essentially no impact on the outcome of the film, but few as clear cut as this one. The Bond film, Goldfinger is similar, with Bond being repeatedly captured, failing to stop the plot, getting both of the Masterson sisters killed, defeating Oddjob purely by luck, and generally being a useless toff up to the final scene; basically he’s good at cheating at golf and discerning indifferently blended brandy. By comparison, Indy at least manages to kill a few Nazis along the way.
Stranger
Archaeology and archaeologists have had a very complex relationship with Indiana Jones - it feeds both the negative and positive elements of our self-image as the cowboys of science. I expect it will get even more complex as the world follows archaeology’s distancing of itself from the sorts of real behaviours it portrayed [which were certainly not restricted to the more excusable inter-war period].
But enough deep philosophising …
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Fave - always loved the burnt image of the medallion when Toht does his Sieg heil - a neat way to kick the plot along and also introduce a delaying twist that gives IJ another chance.
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Quote - the Top Men dialogue
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What aged the best - agree with those who say the whole movie hasn’t aged at all and it still feels fresh. A specific suggestion - the Raiders title font style has taken on a life of its own, and become an iconic way of signalling action-adventure quite separate to the IJ franchise.
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What aged the worst - probably his portrayal as an inadvertent pants-man and student crushee would be done very differently now.
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Unanswerable questions - Belloc’s backstory was very sketchy but previous run-ins with IJ were nicely alluded to. Always wondered what they were.
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Apex mountain - agree with George Lucas not just climbing down the mountain after this brief period of glory, but eventually finding ravines to go down.
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Who won - The viewers - it gave a much-needed boost for fun adventure, which was getting lost in increasingly violent and dark movie and tv watching.
It didn’t do much for the Philistines in the seven months they had it. It caused so much trouble, they gave it back.
Of course, the statement that “any army that carries the Ark before it is invincible” wasn’t so true for the Israelites that not only lost the Ark in battle, but lost 30K men along with it.
In the reality of the film series, I am confident that God would not let the Nazis win with the Ark, especially with that whole “genocide of His chosen people” thing.
One more unanswerable question, that confused me from the first time I saw it lo these 40 years ago: Why DID the USG put the Ark in storage? My theory isn’t that many “Top. Men.” died trying to examine it, but that the USG doesn’t believe it is anything more that a box. But there’s no evidence to support any conclusion.
Aka Porkins.
Too late to edit.
I also wondered if the warehouse where they put the Ark was full of every supernatural thing, like a giant X-Files repository. Not that the USG wanted to analyze/use any of it, so much as they wanted to keep anyone else from doing so.
You call him Dr. Jones, doll!
You know, like the eyelid-batting college student.
And he’d be in his mid to late 20’s, probably before he even got his doctorate. He wouldn’t be the first grad student to sleep with a college sophomore.
It was my first date with my wife.
They stashed it in Warehouse 13.
I rewatched this recently, and I noticed how the Indy/Marion relationship is revealed in stages. There’s the scene with the government men where Abner Ravenwood is first mentioned, and Indy says they had a falling out. Then the “think she’ll still be with him?” dialog with Marcus. Then Indy finds Marion in Nepal and we learn a little more (“Abner was sorry for dragging me all over this earth, looking for his little bits of junk.”). It isn’t until they’re in Egypt that Marion says “Dad had you figured out a long time ago.”
It struck me as odd that she’d referred to her dad by his first name during the prior conversation. Were we supposed to think that Abner and Marion were a married couple, or maybe brother and sister? The details come out gradually, and we never get the full story. We don’t know how old Marion or Indy were at the time, how far the relationship went, or why Abner was so angry about it. It’s enough to know that things ended badly without making Indy too much of a creep.
I’ve always liked…
Indiana: Meet me at Omar’s. Be ready for me. I’m going after that truck.
Sallah: How?
Indiana: I don’t know. I’m making this up as I go.
I think the bit about the Headpiece from the Staff of Ra is a bit of a red herring. The Nazis were digging up pretty much all of Tanis. Even without the Staff or the Map Room, it seems like they’d have found the Well of Souls eventually. If Indy hadn’t gotten involved, the Nazis would still have gotten the Ark.
And then Indy and Marion escaped from the well of souls by breaking through the wall into an exposed building. So had they (the Nazis) explored that building further, they might have noticed the holes linking to the Well of Souls.