More than just an icon

Though best known as the fedora-wearing, bull whip-cracking hero of the Indiana Jones films, Harrison Ford has forged a strong career as an actor, with an impressive filmography that has, in many quarters, gone sadly unnoticed.

One of the downsides to being a movie star — or an actor best known for work in blockbusters, even — is that your skill as an actor is often unappreciated or ignored. In some cases with Ford, that is precisely what has happened. I remember the great Burt Lancaster stating what a great challenge the role of Indiana Jones was, and that it took a great actor to make it work. Lancaster, like Ford, had grown into a fine actor by then, but lest we forget he began his career in swashbuckling B-movies before evolving into the Oscar winner of “Elmer Gantry,” and his finest work, “Atlantic City.”

I first took note of Ford as a true actor in a scary little role he had in the otherwise terrible film “Heroes.”  The actor portrayed a Vietnam vet who loved his time over there, and like buddy Henry Winkler, wanted to go back. Though he had just a few minutes of screen time, he was quietly terrifying, bringing to the part all that was frightening about that war. While the rest of the film was devoted to the mugging of Winkler, it was Ford who left the audience unsettled.

Though he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in “Witness,” Ford was actually better the following year as a mad inventor in “The Mosquito Coast.”  He portrayed a man so hateful of capitalism and America that he flees the United States with his wife and children to create a utopia in the tropics, only to have it all go horribly wrong due to his own massive ego. It was a daring performance because Ford challenged the audience to hate him, to dislike his selfishness and arrogance.

Peter Weir directed the film, with Helen Mirren and River Phoenix no less capable as co-stars, and though it failed at the box office, I believe it to be Ford’s best work to date.

Ford has also been memorable in such films as “Presumed Innocent,” in which he portrayed a man accused of murder, only to find the killer is his wife, and “The Fugitive,” as the good doctor on the run to prove his innocence.

And of course — “Blade Runner.”  Watch his eyes at the film’s beginning as the craft takes off over the city rising up and up with Ford surveying the city below, and everything about it that disgusts him. He was tremendous in this film, something somehow unnoticed until years after its release.

So while we love him as Indiana Jones, and of course the space rogue Han Solo in the “Star Wars” franchise, let’s never forget that this is an artist, an actor, through and through.