For decades, Nazis were reliable movie villains. These are the villains of movies as disparate as The sound of music And Inglourious Basterds. When Steven Spielberg and George Lucas tipped their action heroine titular professor Indiana Jones, who did he go up against first? Fucking Nazis. He did it again in the equally delicious trio. But over the past decade, a funny thing has happened that isn’t funny at all: the Nazis have made an unlikely comeback, all thanks to You Know Who.
Indy is back to fight the Nazis in his fifth and final outing, which takes place in the late 60s. What if Indy was here today? How would he feel about the debates over whether it’s fair to take a real-life Nazi like Richard Spencer in his stupid face? That’s what someone asked Harrison Ford, who gave an unsurprising answer.
I asked Harrison Ford what the ultimate Nazi puncher Indiana Jones would think about the debate about punching Nazis in real life today.
“He was pushing them out of the way to get the first punch. He should too.” pic.twitter.com/rg1L2aFrpi
— Kevin Polowy (@djkevlar) June 13, 2023
“He would have pushed them out of the way to get the first punch — as well as he should,” Ford told Yahoo’s Kevin Polowy. “It was a black and white world,” he said of the rise of the Third Reich. “This evil has presented itself to the world. It is incalculable that this vision of evil is not confronted.
In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate, Mads Mikkelsen plays a former Nazi hired by NASA to work on the Apollo moon landing mission. Of course, he has ulterior motives. Mikkelsen’s character is inspired by Wernher von Braun, who worked in Nazi Germany’s rocket development program, only to find himself in America, working for the US military, NASA and even Walt Disney.
“Seeing it as a threat in 1969, knowing that Wernher von Braun was a Nazi and working for America on the space program after all we knew about his history and who he was associated with,” Ford explained. “I mean, it’s shades of gray in a world that we thought was black and white.”
In short, it’s been a while since there has been a film where the Nazis eat it en masse. But there is always Inglourious Basterds. And this movie where Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton spend two and a half hours shooting down wave after wave of Nazis.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate hits theaters on June 30.
(Via The audiovisual club)