Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade's Leap of Faith Has a Practical Explanation Hiding in Plain Sight

The leap of faith in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is one of the most questioned moments in the series. A bridge hidden by forced perspective camouflage is very cool, but couldn't Indy just feel around for the invisible path without having to be worthy? And why does he see only an empty black chasm when he first looks down? Is it just God's magic? Well, kind of, but there are also in context explanations for how it works, and I'll get to them later in this piece.

Last Crusade is a return to the classic Indy trappings of Sunday school treasures, John Ford Western imagery and dead Nazis. For Steven Spielberg, a filmmaker always working through his relationship with his father, it remains the most personal of the Indy films, so I want to go through all the little nods to fathers that you might have missed.

The Last Crusade opens with Spielberg's own Boy Scout past in Utah

As with the first four Indiana Jones movies, the Paramount logo dissolves into a peak, here a pointed rock from Arches National Park in Utah. A troop of Boy Scouts hikes through the pass. Spielberg was a Boy Scout living in the Arizona desert when he started making short films as a boy, something he explored in The Fabelmans. As a Boy Scout and an Eagle Scout myself, it blew my mind as a kid to see Indiana Jones as a Boy Scout.

Spielberg holds back the reveal of Utah 1912 until after we see that the man in the fedora is not Indiana Jones. Indy is one of the scouts tracking him. It's a really great fake out, and you can imagine Spielberg's dream of a Boy Scout in his Class A uniform in the desert getting the jump on a tough treasure hunter. Young Indy is played by River Phoenix, the late brother of Joaquin Phoenix, who had played Harrison Ford's son in The Mosquito Coast in 1986 and later died tragically young at 23 outside the Viper Room in Los Angeles from an accidental overdose.

Fedora, also known as Garth, is played by Richard Young, who played Davy Crockett in Spielberg's Amazing Stories. In earlier drafts of the script, this character was going to be Abner Ravenwood, Marion's father and Indy's mentor. The prize is the Cross of Coronado, which the film presents as given by the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés to Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1520 as he went in search of the Seven Cities of Gold. It was said to contain a piece of the True Cross. As always, there's a glimmer of God light on the relic, which, as I've pointed out before, Spielberg uses to indicate objects of divine significance, so it probably does hold a splinter of the cross.

The circus train prologue builds every piece of Indy's legend

Indy, still unafraid of snakes at this point, removes one from his buddy, and when his friend asks what he's going to do, the answer is to think of something. Indy is always improvising. When he tries to jump on the horse and it moves, that's a gag from the 1920 Buster Keaton short The Scarecrow, and the chase across the field feels like something right out of John Ford's Stagecoach. The shot of Indy leaping over the camera followed by his pursuers is the exact framing Spielberg used for Indy running from the Hovitos in Raiders.

The Dunn and Duffy circus train has two giraffe heads poking out the top. These, along with the rhino, were props, and the crew actually used the giraffe heads to nod yes or shake no in answer to the first AD's questions over the radio, since the train was so loud. The whole prologue establishes the heroics Indy will use throughout his life. He hops from a horse onto a speeding train as he'll later hop from a horse onto a speeding truck in Raiders. The reptile car leaves him with his fear of snakes, or really it's probably the snake that goes down his pants.

He tames a lion with a bullwhip and scars his chin, which establishes the real scar Harrison Ford has from a car accident. The lion also foreshadows the leap from the lion's head he'll have to make to reach the Grail. The heart patch on Indy's uniform means he holds the rank of Life Scout, the rank just before Eagle. The caboose belongs to Dr. Fantasy, the name producer Frank Marshall used when performing magic tricks as a kid. Marshall came up with the false bottom box, and production designer Elliot Scott suggested doing the trick in a single shot. It's so cool to see River Phoenix pull it off without a cut, though the scout running down the tracks is definitely a double.

Henry Jones and the fedora set up the illumination theme

Back home, Indy passes his Alaskan Malamute named Indiana, which is where he got the name. Indiana was the name of George Lucas's Malamute in the 1970s, and that dog partly inspired Chewbacca because it would sit next to Lucas in the passenger seat of his car and howl all the time.

We meet Henry Jones without seeing his face. He makes Junior count to 20 in Greek, showing the father and son's knowledge of ancient alphabets that guides them through the name of God challenge later. Henry's line about the Grail illuminating him declares his true goal in the quest, which he does attain by the end. Fedora tells Indy he lost today but doesn't have to like it, and gives him the iconic hat, which Spielberg match cuts onto the present. For Spielberg, this feels like his own founding moment, meeting his hero John Ford, the final scene of The Fabelmans, when Ford yelled at him and threw him out of his office but left him with important wisdom. I'll come back to that with the final shot.

From the Coronado to Donovan, the present day is full of callbacks

When the sailor punches Indy, he shakes his hand as if it hurt him more than Indy. Panama Hat returns in a white jacket with a red flower, similar to Indy's outfit in Shanghai in Temple of Doom, minus the bow tie. Barrels on the ship are marked Carbonite, the substance Han Solo is frozen in in The Empire Strikes Back. The ship explodes because it's randomly carrying TNT, like that Nazi truck in Raiders. "Why do they always have explosives? Who cares, it looks cool." As it sinks, we see the Portuguese ship is named the Coronado: the ghost of the conquistador punishing the plunderer.

In the classroom, Indy lectures on the difference between fact and truth. He begins the film uninterested in truth, because that can only be illuminated by reconciling with his father. He points students to Dr. Tyree's philosophy class down the hall. Harrison Ford was actually a philosophy major, and Dr. William E. Tyree at Ripon College was his professor. Indy says X never marks the spot and that 70 percent of archaeology is done in the library, and in this movie, X does mark the spot, in a library.

Indy meets Walter Donovan, played by Julian Glover, who played General Veers in The Empire Strikes Back, and if you listen closely, the piano music at the party next door is John Williams' Imperial March. The stone tablet says the cup resides forever, so the inscription already warns that the Grail will never leave the temple. Donovan recounts the lore: the cup entrusted to Joseph of Arimathea, then the movie's own extension, three knights who found it during the Crusades, one making it back to France to tell a Franciscan friar, the other buried in Venice.

In real world legend, the Holy Grail is a mythologized dish that first appeared around 1190 in Perceval, the Story of the Grail, an unfinished chivalric romance by Chrétien de Troyes. From there it made its way into Arthurian legend and was apocryphally interwoven with the chalice of the Last Supper, if there even was one. Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper doesn't even have a Grail in it. Donovan's line about being one step away pays off when the ground literally falls from under Indy in the second challenge.

Venice hides its X, the Ark and Kazim's vanishing act

In Henry's ransacked house, the painting of the crucifixion shows Joseph of Arimathea riding a lion, linking to the final leap from the lion's head, and another painting shows a knight walking across an invisible bridge, as Indy will. In Venice, the library exterior is the church of San Barnaba. Indy discovers an X on the floor, green on a pale black ground, but when we see the floor later it's all green with only a faint X. We don't notice the gap because Spielberg separates the shots with the gag of the librarian stamping books in time with Indy's blows.

In the catacombs we hear a hint of the Ark theme from Raiders, and Indy doesn't spend long looking at it, because he knows you keep your eyes averted from that thing. Then there are the rats. Spielberg said they cultivated 5,000 rats from birth to ensure they were disease free. The tomb is filled with petroleum water, and if the Brotherhood's single match could light it up, I'd argue the embers dropping from Indy's torch should have too.

Fleeing the Brotherhood by boat, Indy is squeezed between two big ships, as cave walls closed in on him in Temple of Doom. It's as if, ever since the Death Star trash compactor, George Lucas keeps trying to squash Harrison. The boat propeller echoes the plane propeller in Raiders and the ceiling fan in Temple of Doom. Spielberg often uses forced perspective to make actors look closer to blades than they are, but in this shot I'm pretty sure that's actually Harrison Ford on the boat, and the camera rolls for 12 full seconds of wood exploding. Kazim, of the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword, walks off and mysteriously drops out of frame. There's no dock edge there, just a building. He may have dropped to a lower level, but it looks like he falls into nowhere.

Brunwald Castle's cut lines and Michael Kahn's best joke

Indy and Marcus find the city of Alexandretta, known in 1938 as Iskenderun, now in Turkey. In 1938, though, it would have been in the Hatay State, which existed from September 1938 to the summer of 1939. At Brunwald Castle on the German Austrian border, the butler's Scottish accent comes from older drafts that would have opened in a haunted mansion in Scotland before a search for the Fountain of Youth in Africa. Spielberg rejected that plot because he had just produced Poltergeist.

When the butler says he is Mickey Mouse, notice we cut before the line, and his mouth says something else. The original line referenced Jesse Owens, a nod to this Nazi still being bitter over Owens winning gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In 1938, World War II hasn't really begun, but Indy hates the Nazis because they're annexing countries, they're known to be racist, and he went through a lot with them over the Ark.

Henry feels awful for the pottery he smashes over Indy's head until he sees from the cross sections that it's fake. Father and son can both spot a fake, as Indy will with the Grail. Apparently Sean Connery improvised the line about how he knew she was a Nazi: she talks in her sleep. But the best joke of the film, to me, is Michael Kahn's edit cutting from the speech about Brody blending in anywhere to Brody asking if anyone speaks English.

Berlin, the zeppelin and the biplane lean on Hitchcock

Sallah accidentally hides Brody in a door that's actually the back of a Nazi truck, the reverse of the trick he pulled on the Nazis in Raiders. Tied back to back, Henry drops the lighter and spreads the fire, as he'll essentially do behind Junior's back on the plane later. Indy pushes the lever on the far left because he knows it'll make a full rotation, letting him knock out the Nazi and turn his father back around, and he uses the Hitler bust to wedge the door. Having learned how the Brotherhood followed him, he releases a decoy boat and takes off by motorcycle, proving himself a worthy knight by jousting with a flagpole. On a freeze frame, the exploding pursuer is just a dummy on a stationary bike, but in motion it looks amazing.

When Henry speaks of a race against evil, a crucifix is framed exactly behind him, raising the stakes, but Indy calls it an obsession. These issues may be partly rooted in Spielberg's struggle to relate to his father, a computer engineer, as explored in The Fabelmans. At the Berlin book burning, Karl Marx's Das Kapital is on the pile. Hitler is played by Michael Sheard, the U boat captain in Raiders, and Himmler by Ronald Lacey, returning after playing Major Toht. I didn't realize until now that Elsa is standing up there with them. Hitler autographs the diary right over the map of the mountain road.

In the zeppelin line is a World War One flying ace who, in a deleted scene, would have boasted the whole trip before a mishap chasing them in a second biplane, along with an agent played by Pat Roach. Indy tosses out Colonel Vogel with the line "no ticket," and I love that everyone understands from context. Indy couldn't land the plane in Temple of Doom but lands this one. The Messerschmitt chase is an homage to Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and the seagulls borrow from The Birds. Real gulls kept flying away, so for close ups on Connery they used white doves and a mix of mechanical birds. Henry's Charlemagne quote was fabricated by the screenwriters.

A deleted Jewish reference and a tank chase built on consequences

In Hatay, Donovan bribes the ruler with valuables donated by some of the finest families in Germany. Notice the pause between finest and families. The line was originally finest Jewish families, implying Donovan and the Nazis stole these valuables from Jewish families who were rounded up. That's also the implied story of Brunwald Castle: German art collectors eager to steal from Jewish families in exchange for letting the Nazis use their castle as a base.

The tank chase is an homage to John Ford's carriage chase in Stagecoach, which I talked about in my Raiders breakdown. They shot in Spain and built a real steel World War One style tank. Indy shoves a rock in the side gun and gallops in range so it'll fire and burst, but that becomes a problem when he's caught on the same busted gun and can't slide the strap off its bent end. It's really good mousetrapping, one action leading to consequences later. ILM used miniatures and compositing for the camera rushing into Vogel's screaming mouth. When Indy hugs his father, Harrison Ford gives off a boyish look of relief, and his hat comes rolling back up out of the dirt, like a bad penny that always turns up.

The three Grail challenges test reverence, knowledge and faith

The Grail temple exterior is the real Ancient City of Petra in Jordan, a site called Al Khazneh, the Treasury. Donovan shoots Henry to force Indy through the Breath of God, where only the penitent man passes. Indy has shown reverence before, by not looking at the Ark and by praying to Shiva. Notice it's not just kneeling: he also has to roll forward to avoid the vertical blade, a humble throwing of oneself at God's feet rather than a cowardly fall backward.

The Word of God tests his knowledge with Jehovah, which in the Latin alphabet begins with an I. The correct tiles don't seem supported from below, and from the initial shot, the tile Indy hangs onto was marked I, so it may have been a correct letter holding his weight. I like how cruel it is that the J is the front most and biggest tile. The Path of God tests his faith, something Indy has never needed until now. As Henry prays, Spielberg does a dolly zoom, because a lion sits in the background: it's a leap from the lion's head.

The invisible bridge has a practical explanation

Indy discovers the bridge, hidden by forced perspective to blend with the rock wall beyond, and the shot of the camera sliding side to side looks very cool. But when Indy first looked down, there was no rock path at his feet, just a black abyss. Some theories say the bridge wasn't there until a step triggered it to extend from the opposite wall. I'm not really sure about that; I feel like Indy would have seen it come down. Perhaps the bridge is truly invisible until faith is rewarded.

Alongside the magic, there's a practical explanation. Look closely at Indy's lunge: he steps about three feet ahead, over a section that appears completely black from that angle. Those few feet could have been painted black to match the abyss, or the bridge may stop a few feet short of the ledge, which would stop anyone from gingerly feeling around a foot or two out. As I put it, "it would require a true leap of faith." Notice too that Indy goes down a bit on his step. Behind the scenes shots show the bridge sits about 18 inches below the ledge, another way to stop people prodding around with a foot.

Donovan chose poorly, and Indy chose the carpenter's cup

The ancient knight, kept alive by the Grail, is lit with a ghostly pale light compared to the golden firelight elsewhere. Elsa intentionally picks the wrong cup for Donovan, and I just noticed she's in the bottom right corner looking at Indy and shaking her head. For Donovan's death they used a mechanical wig that grew his hair, inflatable pads on Julian Glover's forehead to make his eyes recede, then puppets and stop motion morphed with VFX. The last we see of him is a Nazi pin, his true loyalty and moral corruption.

Indy picks the cheapest, oldest looking cup, because a carpenter in the early Roman Empire wouldn't have had a gold chalice, and Spielberg's God light flickers on his face. Reverence, knowledge and faith pay off. The knight warns the Grail can't pass the seal, meaning its powers only last if you keep drinking and never leave the temple, so no, Indy and Henry aren't immortal. Elsa grabs for it instead of letting Indy pull her up and dies, and the Grail is like the Ring of Power: close to your grasp, you can't help reaching. Indy's finger grazes it, but Henry brings him back by finally calling him Indiana.

The final shot carries John Ford's horizon lesson

Henry's illumination is the mutual respect between father and son, letting go of the quest and recognizing the precious time we have with each other. Spielberg's illumination as a director came from his parents and from people like John Ford, and the closing shot of four riders in the sunset links directly to the end of The Fabelmans, where Ford, played by David Lynch, tells a young Sammy Fabelman, essentially Spielberg himself, that a horizon at the top or bottom of the frame is interesting and one in the middle is boring.

Spielberg ends that movie by nervously tilting the camera to put the horizon at the bottom. And where is the horizon in the final shot of Last Crusade? At the bottom. Illumination.

Which explanation for the invisible bridge do you buy: the painted gap, the lower ledge, or pure divine magic?