The marketing executives are the new high priests of the movie business. It’s natural. They’re handling important sums of money. And they dispense the money dramatically, in big campaigns that flood out over the country. It’s not unusual for more to be spent on marketing a picture than on making it, and this could become commonplace. (Everybody takes it for granted that more is spent selling soap than manufacturing it.) Right now, the easier a project looks to market, the easier it is to finance. And the scope of what these priests think they can sell becomes narrower all the time. Except for the occasional prestige picture that offers middle-class group therapy (“Ordinary People,” “The Four Seasons”), it’s all fantasy. There isn’t a human being on the screen. Having lost the habitual moviegoers, the studio heads have no confidence that if they approve projects they like, an audience will be attracted; they’re trapped by empirical evidence to the contrary. And so they listen to the marketing men, with their priestly jargon—“normatives,” “skewed,” “bi-modal audience.” The mysterious phrases are soothing to the worried studio heads. And when the new geniuses are given what they want—comic-strip pulp or slobby horror—they swing into action heroically. Daggers menace us in TV commercials, magazines, and newspapers, and sometimes the slob movies do become hits. But if you boil out the feathers what it comes down to is: When there’s a flop, the marketing men cluck their tongues and say, “Well, boys, the picture just didn’t have it.” When there’s a hit, the marketing men pound their chests like King Kong and say, “Boy, did we know how to sell it!”

These marketing divisions are a relatively new development. (In earlier years, there were two much smaller departments—advertising and sales.) Their growing power isn’t in any special effectiveness in selling pictures; it’s in their ability to keep pictures that don’t lend themselves to an eye-popping thirty-second commercial from being made or, if they’re made, from being heard of. In the new Hollywood wisdom, anything to do with people’s lives belongs on TV. (As a result, television now makes contact with us in ways that movies no longer do.)

Like poor relations, the print media are the residual legatees of the huge marketing campaigns for pictures. The thinking is that anything associated with a big new hit will become a hot ticket. So magazine editors, ever eager to increase their newsstand sales, prepare their cover stories. Alan Alda, publicizing “The Four Seasons,” is the perfect cover boy for the women’s magazines; if his film makes money, the writers and editors will feel they guessed right. I can’t think of a single occasion when a small movie that really needed help got a slick-magazine cover, no matter how much the in-house critic liked it. The magazines try to ride on a hit picture’s tail wind.

This month, God knows how many publications are featuring “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” a collaboration between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg—both still very young (Lucas is thirty-seven, Spielberg only thirty-three), and each responsible for some of the very top box-office successes in the history of movies. If anybody has a chance to turn movies around, it would seem to be these two (or Coppola). But “Raiders” is a machine-tooled adventure in the pulp-esoterica spirit of Edgar Rice Burroughs; it appears that Lucas and Spielberg think just like the marketing division. According to modern movie legend, Lucas, who had watched the serials of the thirties and forties on television in the fifties, has long cherished the idea of a hocus-pocus series “following the exploits of an adventurer/archeologist, Indiana Jones,” but he got more interested in his other idea—“Star Wars”—and put “Raiders” aside, for later. Over the years, he worked up the story idea with Philip Kaufman—the first picture was to be set in 1936, in order to take advantage of Hitler’s well-known interest in the occult—and in 1977 he offered it to Spielberg to direct. Spielberg, who was then finishing “Close Encounters” and was committed to making “1941,” agreed to do it after that, and Lawrence Kasdan, who had done the rewrite on “The Empire Strikes Back,” prepared the screenplay.

A Lucasfilm, financed by Paramount, “Raiders” is an old-fashioned cliff-hanger produced with incredible sophistication of means. The images have an unreal clarity: the camera shows us more than we could possibly take in if we were there on the spot. And the hero—Indy Jones (Harrison Ford), the daredevil archeologist, whose weapon is a bullwhip—makes the kind of bright-eyed entrance that’s so intensely dramatic it’s funny. Spielberg—a master showman—can stage a movie cliché so that it has Fred Astaire’s choreographic snap to it. He transcends the clichés by sensational, whiplash editing. But Spielberg’s technique may be too much for the genre: the opening sequence, set in South America, with Indy Jones entering a forbidden temple and fending off traps, snares, poisoned darts, tarantulas, stone doors with metal teeth, and the biggest damn boulder you’ve ever seen, is so thrill-packed you don’t have time to breathe—or to enjoy yourself much, either. It’s an encyclopedia of high spots from the old serials, run through at top speed and edited like a great trailer—for flash. It’s like a hit number in a musical which is so terrific you don’t want the show to go on—you just want to see that number again. When the action moves to Indy back home lecturing to an archeology class, you know that Spielberg, having gone sky-high at the start, must have at least seventeen other climaxes to come, and that the movie isn’t going to be an adventure but a competition—Spielberg versus Spielberg. Even if he could keep topping his own showmanship (and he can’t), he’d still be the loser, because the audience is fresher at the start. The central story is the search for the Ark of the Covenant (a chest holding the broken stone tablets of the Ten Commandments). Hitler, we’re told, means to use its invincible powers to lay waste opposing armies and proclaim himself the Messiah. Indy, working for the United States government, races to find the Ark ahead of his arch-enemy, the suave, amoral Belloq (Paul Freeman), who is in cahoots with the Nazis. And the picture races along with Indy.

Kinesthetically, the film gets to you. It gets your heart thumping. But there’s no exhilaration in this dumb, motor excitement. The best of the satirical pulp-adventure movies—the 1939 “Gunga Din” (with a plot lifted from “The Front Page”)—was carefree: there was fresh air between the thrills and the gags, there was time for digressions and for the pleasure of seeing actors you knew horsing around. The picture made you feel good, as if you were singing along with it. In the past, Spielberg has demonstrated a talent for just that kind of elating silliness, and he has a lot of it going here, especially with Harrison Ford, who does mammoth double takes, recoiling in disbelief. But “Raiders” is so professional and so anxious to keep moving that it steps on its own jokes. You can almost feel Lucas and Spielberg whipping the editor to clip things sharper—to move ahead. (I say the two, rather than just Spielberg, because this picture gets dangerously close to cancelling itself out, in a way that recalls “More American Graffiti,” which Lucas also produced.) The effect of the obsessive pace is that the picture seems locked in. Our eyes never have a second just to linger on a face or on an image of planes coming out of the clouds. The frames fit into each other, dovetailing so tight that sometimes it seems as if the sheer technology had taken over. It’s all smart zap—a moviemaker’s self-reflexive feat.