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.
Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in a scene from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, out May 22, 2008. (Photo: Paramount Pictures/AP)
Among Ford's most famous roles:
Action-hero guy:
- Star Wars (1977)
- Apocalypse Now (1979)
- Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
- Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
- Blade Runner (1982)
- Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi (1983)
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Drama/thriller guy
- American Graffiti (1973)
- Witness (1985)
- The Mosquito Coast (1986)
- Frantic (1988)
- Presumed Innocent (1990)
- Patriot Games (1992)
- The Fugitive (1993)
- Clear and Present Danger (1994)
- Air Force One (1997)
- The Devil's Own (1997)
- What Lies Beneath (2000)
Romantic/sensitive guy:
- Working Girl (1988)
- Regarding Henry (1991)
- Sabrina (1995)
Internet Links
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.
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