It’s one of the classic scenes in all of cinema, when Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood finally get some alone time, only for our beaten up and battered hero to fall asleep during the final third of Raiders of the Lost Ark. We see a beautiful reflection of that scene at the very end of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but it appears Karen Allen was less than impressed with the original, iconic scene as she explained back in 2012.
“Well, I remember being very, very disappointed that in the script, he falls asleep. I was like, ‘Really?’ [Laughs] ‘He’s really going to fall asleep here? After all we’ve been through.’ And I think I may have even said, ‘Can we change that?'”
However, revisiting Raiders before embarking on making Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2007, she was pleased to see that the couple clearly enjoyed the night, even though we didn’t see any of it.
“[I] realized Marion wakes up in the bed by herself [the next morning] and she reaches back and pulls her nightgown off the top of the bed. Which I had completely forgotten about, and I thought, ‘Oh, they probably did have their romantic moment.’ I had remembered it as being this moment that didn’t happen, when in fact it didn’t happen on screen. But then Steven had made sure that in that very first beat, we see that I grab my nightgown off of the top of the bed.”
Speaking with Variety after the release of Dial of Destiny, Karen made clear how pleased she was that Indy and Marion did indeed stay together.
“I was deeply happy that Marion came back at least the end of their story. If this is indeed truly the last film of this particular group of films — if this is the last story with Harrison as Indy and me as Marion — I was profoundly happy that it didn’t end without them coming back together. That meant a lot to me, to feel like they were going to ride off in the sunset together.”
