Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) on Netflix
Indiana Jones learns his father, the Grail scholar Henry Jones Sr., has vanished while searching for the Holy Grail. Henry's diary leads Indy to Venice and to the academic Dr. Elsa Schneider.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Back from an expedition, the archaeologist Indiana Jones learns that his father, the Grail scholar Henry Jones Sr., has disappeared and that Henry's home was ransacked. Walter Donovan, who financed Henry's research, asks Indiana to find both the man and the Grail, which the Nazis are also hunting. A package then arrives holding Henry's diary. In Venice, Indiana and his colleague Marcus Brody meet Henry's associate Dr. Elsa Schneider. In a catacomb beneath a library, they find an inscribed shield that marks Alexandretta as the start of the route to the Grail, and members of the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword, sworn to protect the Grail, attack them. Indiana hands Marcus a map from the diary and sends him ahead to Alexandretta.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Because the Zeppelin set was so overheated, Harrison Ford and Sean Connery acted much of the table conversation between Indiana Jones and his father without wearing trousers.
- Sean Connery initially turned down the role of Henry Jones Sr. because he was only twelve years older than Harrison Ford, having avoided franchise films since James Bond; he eventually relented and helped reshape the character.
- The film's climactic scenes shot at Petra made the Jordanian site a tourist magnet: annual visitors went from a few thousand before its release to almost a million.
SPOILER
Donovan's rapid-aging death was the first all-digital composite scene in a movie, created over three months by morphing three puppets of Donovan, built by Stephan Dupuis, in separate stages of decay.- Mechanical effects supervisor George Gibbs built the chase's tank over the frame of a 28-short-ton excavator, with two Range Rover V8 engines, four months of work, and a flight to AlmerÃa on a Short Belfast plane.
- For the catacomb scenes, Lucasfilm ordered 1,000 disease-free gray rats, bred 5,000 of them within five months, and used 1,000 mechanical rats as stand-ins for the ones that were set on fire.
- River Phoenix, who had played the son of Harrison Ford's character in The Mosquito Coast, was Ford's own recommendation to play the young Indiana Jones, because Phoenix looked the most like Ford at that age.
- Sean Connery improvised Henry Jones's line "She talks in her sleep"; it stayed in the film because it made everyone laugh, though in Boam's scripts Henry's admission about Elsa came later.
