Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is not your ordinary archeologist. When we first see him, he is somewhere in the Peruvian jungle in 1936, running a booby-trapped gauntlet (complete with outsized rolling boulder) to fetch a solid gold idol. He loses this artifact to his chief rival, a loyal Nazi named Belloq (Paul Freeman), who then prepares to kill our hero. In the first of many serial-like escapes, Indy eludes Belloq by hopping into a convenient plane. So, then: is Indiana Jones afraid of anything? Yes: snakes. The next time we see Jones, he's a soft-spoken, bespectacled professor in a major midwestern university. He is summoned from his ivy-covered environs to the National Museum of Washington, where Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) asks Indy to secure the Staff of Ra. The Nazis, it seems, need this staff to throw light on the location of the long-lost Ark of the Covenant, which the mystical-minded Hitler hopes to use to make his storm troopers invisible. The Staff of Ra was under the protection of Indy's old friend Abner Ravenwood, whose daughter Marion (Karen Allen) evidently has a "history" with Jones. Whatever their personal differences, Indy and Marion become partners in one action-packed adventure after another, ranging from wandering the snake pits of the Well of Souls to surviving the pyrotechnic unearthing of the sacred Ark. A joint project of Hollywood prodigies George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, with a script cowritten by Lawrence Kasdan and Philip Kaufman, among others,, Raiders of the Lost Ark is not so much a movie as a 115-minute thrill ride. Costing $22 million (nearly three times the original estimate), Raiders of the Lost Ark reaped $200 million during its first run. It was followed by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1985) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), as well as a short-lived TV-series "prequel."