Take 239: Hanover Street & Blade Runner - Harrison Ford In Review Pt 1

Mostly Film – Take 239: Harrison Ford In Review — Episode 1

A new series begins. Jonathan and JP are spending six episodes inside the Harrison Ford filmography — not Star Wars, not Indiana Jones, but everything else. The films he made between the blockbusters, against the blockbusters, and long after the world had already decided who he was.

Episode 1 starts with a question: who is Harrison Ford when he isn't playing a hero the whole world already loves?

First up, Hanover Street — the 1979 WWII romance that Ford took because he'd never played a love scene before, hated making from start to finish, and has never seen. A film so thoroughly forgotten that it's not currently streaming anywhere. And yet there's a case to be made for it — Christopher Plummer quietly doing excellent work, a second half that generates real suspense, and Ford visibly more comfortable the moment someone points a gun at him than the moment someone kisses him. Which turns out to be genuinely revealing.

Then Blade Runner. Fifty-plus consecutive nights of artificial rain. A crew so fed up they wore protest T-shirts. A director and star who feuded constantly over the voiceover, the Deckard question, and basically everything else. A film that flopped on release the same day as The Thing — both considered too cold and strange for audiences who just wanted to watch E.T. — and went on to become one of the most influential science fiction films ever made. Ford has called it not one of his favourites. The Final Cut suggests he was wrong.

The big debates: is Deckard a replicant? Which version did you watch? And does Ford's performance hold up, or does Rutger Hauer walk away with the entire film in the last ten minutes?

Up next: the Peter Weir years — Witness and The Mosquito Coast. The argument is that it's the best acting Ford ever did.