WHY HARRISON FORD’S BEST ROLES ARE NEITHER HAN NOR INDY:

Ford leaned into the idea of blockbuster stardom following the success of Star Wars, banging out two sequels to George Lucas’s space opera, the first two Indiana Jones flicks, and Blade Runner (not a blockbuster, but certainly a movie that aspired toward blockbuster-dom) in the years that followed. Sure, he had bit parts in interesting movies (Apocalypse Now) and bigger parts in worse movies (Hanover Street) during this time, but this was the age of Harrison Ford, Superstar. He wasn’t asked for nuance; he wasn’t being hired to delve deep into his craft. It was pure, brute force charisma.

And then, in 1985, Ford starred in Witness. Directed by the great Australian director Peter Weir and written by Earl W. Wallace and William Kelly, Witness is part thriller, part romance, part culture clash story, and part work of anthropology. Ford plays a homicide detective named John Book who is investigating the murder of an undercover cop. The only witness to the crime is Samuel, a young Amish boy (Lukas Haas). Due to the perpetrators of the crime being other cops, Book, after being wounded in a shootout with one of them, is forced to take refuge in the Amish community cut off from modernity.

And Ford is terrific. The character as written is an archetypical kind of movie cop: mildly schlubby (see how he digs into that hot dog), a bit awkward, at his best when being a cop. Most notably, for me, is how Ford handles Book’s occasional bursts of rage. This was not an emotion he’d been called on to express in previous films, and at the end of Witness, when Ford explodes at the police chief covering up the actions of his officers, he seems truly dangerous, expressing a kind of raw-voiced fury you wouldn’t want to find yourself in front of.

Witness, for which he received his only Academy Award nomination, seemed to have unlocked something in Ford: that he could be both a huge movie star and a serious actor. The Mosquito Coast, his second film with Weir and to my mind his single best performance, followed.

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