A year earlier there had been the massacre at the Bologna station, the most serious terrorist act in Italy since the end of the Second World War (the years of lead are generally relegated to the 70s but terrorist attacks and murders continued in reality since the mid-1980s).
Yet the Italians in 1981 were already in the midst of what was called the ebb, or, depending on the point of view, a withdrawal into the private sector with the rejection of political commitment and ideology, or, more simply, a renewed desire to have fun and look at the world with new eyes.
In this climate,
Indiana Jones and the predators
of Steven Spielberg's
lost ark
arrived in Italian cinemas in the autumn of 1981 to stay there for a long time
. A phantasmagoric return to adventure cinema, seasoned with mystery and irony and reinterpreted in the light of the new postmodern inclination, that is, one that believes that everything has already been done and that one cannot but re-read and 're-aggregate' thus giving new life to materials already seen.
And in fact Indiana Jones was born from the passion of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg for TV series and comics of the 40s as well as for the great Hollywood tradition (The treasure of the Sierra Madre, for example) but revisited in the light of the technical possibilities of era, with Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, and Spielberg's perfectionism. Add in exotic locations, the eternal struggle between the good and the bad, a 007-like hero quickly became - it must be said - iconic, and that's it.
A game that earned the first chapter 20 times what it cost, which anointed Harrison Ford, won four Oscars, gave birth to three sequels, a television series, numerous video games, novels and other works inspired by that climate and that character, to begin with. from Robert Zemeckis' In Pursuit of the Green Stone with Michael Douglas.
And that he was, to all intents and purposes, the 'grandfather' of current comic book-inspired blockbuster productions.
