For decades Nazis were reliable go-to movie baddies. They’re the villains of films as disparate as The Sound of Music and Inglourious Basterds. When Steven Spielberg and George Lucas bowed their tenured professor action hero Indiana Jones, who did he duke it out with first? Frickin’ Nazis. He did it again in the also delightful threequel. But in the last decade a funny thing happened that’s not funny at all: Nazis improbably made a comeback, all thanks to You Know Who.
Indy is back to battling Nazis in his fifth and final outing, which takes place in the late ‘60s. But what if Indy was around today? What would he make of the debates about whether to not it’s right to coldcock a real-life Nazi like Richard Spencer in his stupid face? That’s what someone asked Harrison Ford, who gave a not very surprising answer.
I asked Harrison Ford how ultimate Nazi puncher Indiana Jones would feel about the debate over punching Nazis in real life today.
“He’d push ’em out of the way to get in the first punch. As well he should.” pic.twitter.com/rg1L2aFrpi
— Kevin Polowy (@djkevlar) June 13, 2023
“He’d push them out of the way to get in the first punch — as well he should,” Ford said to Yahoo’s Kevin Polowy. “That was a black-and-white world,” he said of the rise of the Third Reich. “This evil presented itself to the world. It’s incalculable that this vision of evil not be confronted.”
In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, 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 wind up in America, working for the U.S. Army, NASA, even Walt Disney.
“To see a threat of it in 1969, to know that Wernher von Braun was a Nazi and worked for America on the space program after all we knew about his history and who he associated with,” Ford explained. “I mean, these are shades of gray in a world we’d thought was black and white.”
Anyway, it’s been a while since there’s been a movie where Nazis eat it en masse. But there’s always Inglourious Basterds. And that movie where Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton spend 2 ½ hours gunning down wave after wave of Nazis.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny hits theaters on June 30.
(Via The AV Club)