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Seldom does the team inspire more affection than its top player, but such is the puzzling case of Harrison Ford. In Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Blade Runner, the man has quarterbacked two of the most popular franchises, and one of the most adored cult flicks, in the history of the big screen.

Yet history, that fickle judge, seems to find him wanting. As a movie actor, he's more tolerated than respected. As a movie star, he's more respected than loved. Even his all-American name, with its presidential stamps, comes with something of a taint — those sickly Harrisons and that klutzy Ford aren't exactly revered, their reputations a lot less hallowed than the office they held. Change office to box office, and so it is with this Ford. Which raises the questions: Why? And is it fair?

Certainly, no one can deny the lucre, fuelled largely by those twin franchises, that his films have generated: nearly $6-billion (U.S.) worldwide and counting.

Sure, there are other pretenders to the title of box-office king, but with the release next week of the latest addition to the Indy saga, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, expect Ford to soon be wearing the crown again. Flanking him, of course, are the true powers behind the throne, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, the directors who changed the movies by pioneering the blockbuster, the sort of visual extravaganza that places a high premium on spectacle and attaches a low importance to actors. So low you might even suggest that the actors are tolerated more than respected. Enter Mr. Ford.

When he and the blockbusters made their breakthrough back in the seventies, the admired screen actors of Ford's generation — De Niro, Pacino, Hoffman, even Nicholson — were already on the scene. They had chops, they had range, they rose to prominence in the anti-establishment era of the anti-hero, in nuanced roles that saw them continuing the Brando legacy of method-acting intensity. Ford wasn't even invited to that party. He struggled in bit parts (including one in American Graffiti), got fired by Columbia from a $150-a-week contract, even quit the biz to pursue more lucrative work as a carpenter — at one point, building cabinets for Lucas's kitchen. That's when it happened: the invitation, at the hardly tender age of 35, to fly the Han Solo role in 1977's Star Wars.

That's also when other things started to change.

As the summer blockbuster began its rise, so did the action-adventure plots it favours, and the type of protagonist those plots demand. Yes, the anti-hero was dying out and the hero riding tall again. You could even argue that Ford fired a symbolic shot here. After all, in a brief appearance in Apocalypse Now, he played the killjoy who ordered the Brando character to be "terminated with extreme prejudice." Terminated too, by extension, were the artsy aspirations of Brando's method. By contrast, and by his own admission, Ford is a proud subscriber to the "Let's pretend" school of acting.

A few years later, with the first Indiana Jones, Ford took to the saddle, and his long ride began. Indeed, the Indy model with its hero-in-peril template would define virtually the rest of his career. What's more, that template would in turn dictate what we came to see through all those succeeding summers in all those imitating blockbusters. And the formula is simply this: heroic action frequently punctuated by comic banter.

Given its influence, then, the original model is worth a closer examination. Clearly, Indiana Jones borrows from the Superman notion of the schizoid hero — the bespectacled professor inside the classroom, the bullwhipping crusader outside. The plots are a classic American mix of church and state, wedding a fundamentalist's belief in arks of the covenant and holy grails with the moral imperative to battle Nazis and crush evil. Spielberg's direction presides over a similar marriage of the old and the new, bringing his visual flair and technical flash to rejuvenate B-movie shtick — literal cliffhangers and all manner of speeding cars, trucks, boats, trains, planes. Really, these are (loco)motion pictures.

But — and this is where history does him an injustice — don't underestimate the singular importance of Ford to the template. Obviously, in a purely physical sense, he has the heroic goods, with that 6-foot-1-inch frame and those rock-solid features — firm chin, strong nose, thick brown hair, clear blue eyes. Together, they're arranged into his signature look, that slightly hooded gaze of steely determination, haunted on occasion but never daunted. However, Ford can also relax those features, suddenly and always surprisingly, into a broad grin that's wholly genuine, a ray of credible sunshine bursting through the sombre cloud.

That's his entire acting range.

Those are the two opposing, binary expressions in his world of pretend. The range is narrow, but here's the rarity: Both poles seem absolutely real and natural. That realism is what sets Ford above the wooden likes of fellow actioners like Stallone and Schwarzenegger. More important, it also distinguishes him from the Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson and Burt Reynolds contingent. Unlike them, he never appears to be winking at the camera; he can play the comic banter without reducing it to cheap irony or easy camp.

Ford, then, wears the Indy fedora with an air of authority spiced with a hint of amusement, and both feel simultaneously right. So it's no coincidence that the most celebrated scene in the whole saga - Indy lets the sword-wielding villain show off his menacing art, then plugs the guy with a single bullet - does exactly what its star does: combine no-nonsense authority and sudden fun in a single frame. That sequence is Ford's best argument against history's judgment, his kingly claim, "La franchise, c'est moi."

No doubt, the binary equations of Indiana Jones, with its good-versus-evil plot and it's action-versus-banter methods, let an essentially binary actor like Ford feel completely at home. But what's the guy to do elsewhere?

Typically, he's stayed in the role of the imperilled hero standing up to jeopardy's hardships - to wrongful accusations impugning his goodness (Presumed Innocent, The Fugitive); to threats from terrorists (Patriot Games, Air Force One) or drug cartels (A Clear and Present Danger); even to mischievous doings in the City of Light (Frantic). But each of these films, the ones that dominate his canon, use only half of his already-narrow range. It's always the sober, haunted, hooded look, so pervasive that his onscreen archetype has bled into his off-screen reputation - a grumpy sort of fellow who doesn't get out much.Maybe that's why, later in his greying life, he would pop up on talk shows sporting an earring in his pierced lobe - a reminder to him, if no one else, that there's also a playful gamin inside the professional grump.

A few times, Ford did venture into straight comedy (in the mediocre Six Days, Seven Nights and the much better Working Girl), but he seems a bit stiff in exclusively comic terrain, rather like that late-life earring of his - not quite right, trying a little too hard.

How to get the balance restored? Well, like others of his box-office magnitude (Eastwood or Redford), he might have gone behind the camera to direct himself in hand-picked scripts. Instead, Ford went straight to the established directorial talent and to some very big names - Roman Polanski (Frantic), Sydney Pollack (Sabrina, Random Hearts), Mike Nichols (Working Girl but also Regarding Henry), Alan Pakula (Presumed Innocent but also The Devil's Own). The problem is evident from the list: Somehow, working with Ford, these top-of-the-line directors were never at the top of their game.

There's a notable exception: Peter Weir's Witness, an upmarket thriller that allowed Ford to elevate and refine the act he brought to the mass-market Indy franchise. For once, he got to play both sides of his spectrum, and the only time he did is the only time he earned an Oscar nomination - respect, finally and fleetingly. His Witness hero is imperilled again, a cop running from police corruption and finding sanctuary in the austere Amish community. Here, however, his sober sides pale in comparison to the sobriety around him. Hell, he's a relative oasis of levity in a desert of greybeards, and that contrast lets him push the fun button - a tough guy when the baddies arrive, but, elsewhere, looking ridiculous in his Amish duds, wreaking clumsy havoc on a milk cow, even at one delicious point breaking into an impromptu jitterbug. Garbo talks, Ford dances - and Oscar knocks.

But that's the rule breaker, and this is the rule: In Witness, Ford's character is at odds with his surroundings, and, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, the same might be said of Ford himself. Yes, as a binary actor in an age of binary movies, he won the lottery. Lucas and Spielberg made him very rich and very famous. But other directors, with Ford's compliance, never quite figured out how to invest the winnings, to utilize a talent so real and yet so limited. Macho stars of the past - John Wayne, Gary Cooper - got trapped in their own boxes, but audiences embraced them despite their limitations. Not so much with Ford. Global generations have grown up and fallen deeply in love with the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, yet far less deeply with the carpenter who helped to build them. Ford was never meant to be Brando's heir, but he's not Cooper's or Wayne's either.

Consequently, even in this celebrity-obsessed epoch, fans have given Ford his privacy rather willingly. In his personal life, marked by the usual quota of divorces, he seems at least as interesting as most Hollywood icons - an ardent conservationist, a political liberal, a mind quick enough to say of the U.S. incursion into Iraq: "I'm for regime change in both places." The Duke would never have uttered that heresy, yet history didn't take much notice. The throngs made Reagan their president, and Arnie their governor, and Eastwood their mayor, but this idol doesn't get their unqualified vote. And that makes him an intriguing puzzle - not for what he is, where he's succeeded, but for what he isn't, where he's fallen short. The force that is with Harrison Ford also turns against him - his star's place in the pantheon is assured, and assuredly odd.