Among the many skilled performers who toil in front of the camera, only a few are excellent actors. Rarer still are those with the vague and elusive traits we call star quality or bankability. At the intersection of these groups is the most select group of all, a tiny number among whom Harrison Ford stands out.

Ford is one of few stars who receives critical respect even in th eblockbuster action films that attract more dollars than Oscars. He has starred in seven of the 20 highest-grossing films of all time.

Like many of the great stars of the '30's and '40's, his appeal lies in a remarkable blend of the ordinary and the heroic. Audiences view such favorites as Cary Grant and John Wayne in the third person; great to watch but hard to identify with - too perfect, too much larger than life. But others, such as Humphrey Bogart and James Stewart, appear real enough to invite identification no matter how unreal their onscreen exploits, Ford fits squarely in the latter category.

Like Bogart, Ford's potential as a leading man went unrecognized during more than a decade of work in Hollywood. Perhaps because, like Bogart, Ford is handsome but not perfect looking, he can replicate Bogart's trick of becoming an unappealing geek with a change of expression and a pair of glasses. Through the '60's and early '70's, he played bit parts in run-of-the-mill genre films and television shows. For the most part, he showed up as either likable young men or sneering villains.

By themselves, neither of these types makes for a very interesting performance. What has become Ford's increasing strength over the years is his ability to combine the two; to show us the nice guy beneath the creep or, more frequently, the creep beneath the nice guy. This tension - much like the duality that James Stewart explored in his films for Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock - turns up repeatedly throughout Ford's career, informing the best of his work........

.....Playing Han Solo was certainly Ford's first major step in defining his onscreen persona. Solo fell squarely in the tradition of such reluctant Bogart heroes as Rick Blaine in "Casablanca" and Harry Morgan in "To Have and Have Not"; the embittered man of the world who discovers that he's a better person than he thinks.....

....The success of "Star Wars" led to Ford's first leading roles, and his early choice of vehicles revealed a taste more intersting than commercially shrewd. "Hanover Street" and "The Frisco Kid" were almost perversely unlikely projects..."The Firsco Kid" might have been hilarious with Mel Brooks at the helm, but it ended up, oddly enough, in the hands of Robert Aldrich, whose many talents didn't include a knack for Catskills humor. Still, the film gave us a sense of Ford's strong skill as a comic foil, a skill he has rarely used since, except in his second-banana role opposite Melanie Griffith in "Working Girl".

Throughout the early '80's, Ford solidified his position as the thinking man's action hero. While continuing on as Han Solo, he expanded his already hugh star status with "Raiders of the Lost Ark". Even though "Raiders" and its successors represented the epitome of "popcorn" movies, Jones was a more complex character than Solo. Ford was able to display his chameleonlike ability to switch back and forth between a dashing hero and a staid professor....

During this period, Ford also starred in "Blade Runner", an expensive failure that has outlived many of the '80's biggest hits.....In addition to its many other merits, "Blade Runner" represents a crucial shift in Ford's career. Most action stars, chomping at the bit of their genre's restrictions, are eager to be cast completely against type - a strategy that fails more often than succeeds. With "Blade Runner", Ford chose to deepen his popular persona rather than abandon it. Patricularly in the director's cut, with its stronger hints that Ford's android-hunting cop may indeed be an android himself, "Blade Runner" takes the star's image of a grizzled, cynical man of action to an almost unthinkable extreme.

Ford's only Oscar nomination came with "Witness". On the surfact it was another action film, but it was (as Roger Ebert pointed out at the time) a love story first, a moral drama second and a thriller third. Likewise, "The Mosquito Coast" had the trappings of an adventure film, when, in reality, it was a study of destructive monomania. It was a flop, possibly because of Ford's bold performance: Refusing to sugarcoat his character, Ford deliberately made Allie Fox grating and unpleasant.....

"The Fugitive for all its TV roots and its pulp-story conventions, represents Ford at his peak. Unlike "Regarding Henry", who swung from one extreme to the other, Dr. Richard Kimble is an average middle-class citizen whose stable life is ripped from him. The experience doesn't make him a different person. Instead it amplifies his best and worst tendencies. Ford gives Kimble a neurotic, brooding undercurrent that is not simply the result of his plight. (His nervous beard picking and averted eyes during the police-interrogation scenes are perfect bits of business.)

While David Janssen may have seemed irreplacable as Kimble to TV fans, Ford takes Janssen's doleful interpretation into darker, more confused psychological waters. His casting seems, in retrospect, inevitable. The part of Kimble requires someone average enough to pass unnoticed through crowds but also someone heroic enough to make the character's survival convincing. Who else besides Ford at this stage of his career could have pulled it off?

It's a perfect summation of the best work of a nearly 30-year career - a career that is still in its ascendancy.

Excerpts from an article by Andy Klein
Originally published in
the Hollywood Reporter
March, 1994