I think if Spielberg had focused more on “Men's Adventure” magazine pulp imagery, some of the other sequences like the one with the ants would have worked better.
Also, action films do not seem to be Spielberg's strong suit.
But that is neither here nor there when it comes to addressing the points of this article. I'll dive in deeper in a later post but as with The Crucible, Indy is “suspect” of having ties to Communists because he does!
There were witches in The Crucible AND Communists in our government, the questions come down as “do you trust the words of a person on the stand when they out others” and “what's so bad about being a witch/communist”.
So Indy's wartime espionage partner is a double agent and Indy cracked under Soviet pressure in the United States. It doesn't mean he willingly betrayed America but then he was not put on trial or convicted in the movie. Pressure was brought to bear on his institution of higher learning.
And did colleges have “Better dead than Red” rallies? Dissent magazine goes back to the mid-1950s. Communists had been on campuses since the 1930s (and maybe even 1910s). Folkies were proud Communists.
It's a bit misguided of the filmmakers to present Communists as an external threat alone. The atomic bomb secrets were handed over by stateside traitors. Want to know why there was a Cold War of aggression with the Soviets? Because they were given a boost.
I'll dig more into this later.