![]() ![]() There is office chatter and noises all about and Book gets a call he’s gotta take. It begins with Book flipping through mug shots with the boy, the two appearing bored, but the image clearly establishing a trust already bound between them. Once, there, we witness (ha) a terrific moment of suspense that in modern film would undoubtedly get trimmed to a few seconds but here runs an astonishing three full minutes, unspooling with a deliciously slow burn. ![]() However, let’s get back to that moment in the office, ‘cus, well, it’s pretty friggin’ sweet.Īt around the twenty-five minute mark, after some affecting setup and development, Book brings Rachel and Samuel to the crowded police station, this after the mother and son spent the night at his sister’s house. Wanna know what happens? Watch the dang movie. Once there though, he develops a powerful relationship with these earnest and hard-working men and women, including Samuel, but especially Rachel (making her the second woman of this name in movies to do so). Circumstance as they are, Booker fears for the boy’s life and goes undercover in the Amish community to protect him while the investigation continues. Assigned to the case is Detective John Book ( Ford), who is stunned when the boy, while in the station, makes a certain revelation that has profound effect. At a stop in Philadelphia, making a connection, the boy heads to the restroom and while there, happens to secretly witnesses a murder. Young, recently widowed Amish mother Rachel Lapp ( Kelly McGillis) and her son Samuel ( Lukas Haas) travel by train through Pennsylvania, headed to see Rachel’s sister. And really, aside from his great work, the movie itself is a terrific story, well-directed and acted with a supporting cast that make this still one of the best movies about, well, the Amish, ever made, but also cop thrillers in general. Ford deserves all the credit he gets, delivering a smart, impactful performance that relies on the actor’s considerable charms and intensity in all new ways, his interpretation on screen much more reserved that what we’d, at that time, came to expect. ![]() Amid these huge blockbusters though, he snuck in a few not-so-iconicy titles that offered him a chance to spread his wings a bit in terms of diverse characters, such as the now beloved Rick Deckard from Blade Runner, however it was with Peter Weir‘s Witness where he finally earned some real acting cred, earning himself his only Academy Award acting nomination so far … though I smell me a Governors Award coming soon.Įither way, Witness had film critics slathering all kinds of love upon it and it did pretty darned well at the box office, despite no Wookies and a decided lack of a fedora … though there’s plenty of straw hats. By the middle of the 1980s Harrison Ford was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, being part of both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film franchises, making him arguably the most successful action star of his time … and he was only getting started. ![]()
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