Young Indiana Jones and the Hollywood Follies

Young Indiana Jones and the Hollywood Follies went out as a TV movie – the first of four to run on The Family Channel in the US – in October 1994. I just checked, and I’m actually 7 days off watching it on the 30th anniversary of it airing for the first time. Totally unplanned by me, just a funny coincidence.

Sitting here in the post-show afterglow of having now finished the last of the 22 mashed-up movie-length Young Indy movies, the main question in my head is, “Truly, who was this movie made for?”

Similar to the previous movie, where I pondered a similar thought, I can’t see people who tune into Indiana Jones for the adventure to be too interested in this. Granted, there’s one set-piece towards the very end where Indy, deputised at the last moment as a Hollywood stuntman, leaps onto a runaway coach and ends up doing a pretty on the nose prototype of the Raiders truck chase, but outside of that… nothing. It’s just Indy mooning over a girl (again), and having comedic run-ins with the 1920s/30s director, Erich von Stroheim, then working on a film with the famous western director, John Ford.

While improbable to begin with, those two main plot strands – Indy trying to rein-in the production excesses of von Stroheim, and working on a film with Ford – aren’t the most interesting things our hero could be getting up to, when you consider other options. How about being taken asked to help on an archaeological dig (perhaps as part of his college education)? What about solving a crime or simply doing something less ‘showbusiness’ – especially when the previous movie was all about the theatre side of showbusiness already? When you think Indiana Jones, you don’t really think of ‘the industry’.

Particularly in the case of von Stroheim, who directed a handful of films 70 years before this TV movie went out, is the average Indiana Jones fan going to be interested in that, or even know who he is? He’s relatively obscure to the modern audience, but I can imagine the production team behind this perhaps fascinated with the topic due to being in the industry, and it’s hard to deny the whole Hollywood-in-the-1920s angle doesn’t have some glamour in general. When you toss in writers talking about the art of writing into the mix, however, this one certainly feels even more self-indulgent than others in the series. Is it what the mass audience wants? Even the meta nature of Indiana Jones – a movie character – appearing in a TV series where he’s playing a movie character – doesn’t really move the dial for me.

And on the topic of mooning over a girl, it needs to be said that we have Indy back to the same stupid persona from his Mata Hari relationship in Demons of Deception. Here, the object of Indy’s infatuation is a screenwriter named Claire, who already has a boyfriend. This doesn’t stop Indy and, as part of a storyline that’s trying to show Claire to be quite 1990s for a 1920s woman, she doesn’t seem to mind, either. However, it’s Indy’s petulant, “YOU BELONG TO ME!” screaming rant at her at one stage (note, they haven’t even slept together when he says this and, as far as I can tell, don’t sleep with one another at all), that reminds me of how possessive of Mata Hari he was, too. It’s a really strange character flaw that can’t be coincidental in the writing of this series, and it’s really ugly whenever it rears its head.

Probably the coolest historical person used in the movie is Wyatt Earp. That might leave some people blinking, “Huh? Wyatt Earp? In the 1920s? In Hollywood?” Despite knowing this, I sometimes forget myself that the man best remembered for the gunfight at the OK Corral some 40 years earlier, was also a consultant on some western films around this era. Tombstone in 1881 and Hollywood in 1920 were quite different places, yet he existed in both of them. I like the idea of Indy having met such a famous figure from the wild west as it’s someone Indy – if he was real – would have read about in books when he was growing up, and probably idolised. Indeed, when Earp is showing an actor how to shoot with a rifle, Indy is picking up the broken bottles being shot at quite reverently. Nothing is said, but from Flanery’s performance you get the feeling Indy might souvenir them as, “bottles shot by Wyatt Earp”.

Am I glad the series ends here? In some ways, yes. In some ways, no. It’s perfectly true that the post-WW1 stories make me wonder while watching them, “Is this interesting? Who is it for?” and give off a general vibe of being old-fashioned entertainment that doesn’t have a clear audience or, at least, an audience that broadly meshes with the audience for the Harrison Ford films. That said, I do know there were planned episodes, such as Honduras, December 1920 where Indy would meet the Belloq character from Raiders and befriend him. Another episode, Brazil, December 1921 was to involve Indy and Belloq in a search for a lost city, and meeting Percy Fawcett. These two episodes alone sound like they could have been really good. Indy would of course find Fawcett in the novel, Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils.

So what to score this? I’m going to give it an 8/10 which I qualify, much like the previous movie, as being an 8/10 for what it’s trying to achieve, and how it goes about it within the confines of what the show actually is. So this isn’t the same 8/10 that I would give a modern film that I thought was quite good, for example. Now to sit back and think about the series as a whole. An essay for another day, perhaps.