REMEMBER THE GERMAN AEROPLANE?

My son Nick, who was screening a series of classic films for his friends, put on the 1981 Spielberg pulse-pounder, Raiders of the Lost Ark, which came out in the year he was born and therefore stood to him, in terms of the history of film and the decline of taste, as Casablanca does to me.

- PETER GARRISON

FOR MOST PEOPLE, THE MOVIE’S most memorable scene was the encounter between our bullwhip-wielding archaeologist hero and an Arab swordsman in a Cairo marketplace. After the would-be assassin puts on a menacing display of fancy samurai-style scimitar-waving, Indiana Jones, who has no time to waste, sets aside his usual sportsmanship and casually dispatches the black-clad virtuoso with a single revolver shot. Persons of unusually persistent memory may recall, however, that one of the film’s many other climaxes involved a fistfight between Jones and a gigantic shirtless Nazi – or Nazi employee, just following orders, since his party affiliation remained unspecified – underneath a big German aeroplane. That encounter ends when the certain victor in the unequal contest (that is, the giant) backs into a whirling propeller.

My son, showing that when it comes to a fondness for using big words – sesquipedalianism, I almost said – the fruit does not fall far from the tree, texted me: “Is the plane whose prop eviscerates a large bald man in raiders of the lost ark a real plane or is it a contrivance?”

No, I replied, the aeroplane was not real. But it was interesting nonetheless.

The plane was dreamed up by production designer Norman Reynolds. Designing a historically plausible and yet dramatic-looking Nazi aeroplane was not difficult, since the German aircraft industry was by far the most innovative of its time and came up with many stranger-than-fiction designs. It has been a fathomless mine of aeronautical nonce-formations, together with some remarkably prescient concepts.