12 Classic Movies That Got Away With Problematic Scenes
11. The Foreign Caricatures - Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom
Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom is so erroneous and insensitive in its portrayal of Hinduism that the movie is still banned in India.
In the first Indiana Jones movie, they were on safe ground with the Nazis as the villains of the piece. You can pretty much do what you want with them; famously some of the most evil people in history, there’s no limit to how depraved and rotten you can make them.
In Temple Of Doom though, the Hindu cult in the catacombs is just bizarre, and just plays up the evil foreigner trope to ridiculous proportions.
The fact that Indians, a country with one of the highest rates of vegetarians in the world, were depicted as eating monkey brains and eyeball soup also lands with a thud these days.
White saviour movies have frequently been criticised, but Temple Of Doom is perhaps the worst example of this trope ever.
It’s the kind of film that you can completely understand Hollywood making in the ‘80s, but that says more about how blinkered the movie industry used to be than it does anything else.