Chapter 3, Part 2 - Harrison Ford: New Directions

HAND-OVER STREET

Harrison Ford was next moved from one World War Two tale straight into another. ‘After Force Ten I was looking forward to doing some building alterations to my house in the Hollywood Hills when Kris Kristofferson dropped out of Hanover Street in England,’ explains Ford. ‘They asked me to come to London and take over his role at very short notice. I played an American B-52 bomber pilot stationed in wartime Britain who falls in love with an English nurse (Lesley-Anne Down) married to a British Intelligence Officer (Christopher Plummer). I enjoyed making it, but the long schedule meant it was quite some time before I saw my home again.’

Despite the fact that Ford got along well with his co-stars, Ford hadn’t entirely enjoyed his involvement in the movie, and didn’t talk much about the film until it was long behind him. ‘I don’t even like to think about Hanover Street,’ said Ford just before the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark. ‘The director (Peter Hyams) and I did not get along. I’ve never even seen the film.’ All of which begs the question, then why appear in the movie at all? Ford had an answer for that. ‘My motivation for doing Hanover Street was because I had never kissed a female human being on the screen before. The characters I played were totally sexless, and here was a movie that was being touted as a romance. That was a clear, obvious reason for doing it.’ Then he added, ‘There are a lot of other reasons, which may or may not have been the right ones for doing it.’

Harrison Ford puckers up for his first screen kiss ... ahhh!

What Ford doesn’t explain is that if he hadn’t taken the role, the project would have in all likelihood have collapsed, leaving a crew of 120 jobless and the backers General Cinemas out of pocket to the tune of $7 million. Something else Ford doesn’t mention is that the long separation from Mary would put a big strain on their marriage.

But for all that, the critics were less than kind about Hanover Street. Said Playboy’s Bruce Williamson, ‘Ford, as a romantic leading man, is fairly stolid and one-dimensional, labouring hard to simulate the kind of casual charm that Redford, Newman and a dozen other male actors must work hard to conceal when they want to be taken seriously. Hyams gives us a pair of lovers who seldom appear to enjoy each other very much.’ Uncharitable, perhaps, but cinema audiences seemed to agree on the whole and the film, taking just $3 million in the US, set no box-office records.

To be fair, while the movie plods during the romantic sequences with the gorgeous Lesley-Anne Down and a distinctly uncomfortable-looking Harrison Ford – due mostly to a complete lack of chemistry between the two – it picks up during the mission when Plummer and Ford operate behind enemy lines disguised as Nazis.

Harrison Ford, not disguised as a nazi.

The movie gossip magazines, like People, were more interested in making a story out of Ford and his Hanover Street co-star Lesley-Ann Down being more than just co-workers. But there was more to the failure of the Fords’ marriage than just idle gossip. The fact was that Mary was becoming increasing more uncomfortable with the circus that went along with Harrison’s blossoming film career. Pictures of her in the post-Star Wars hoopla showed her on Harrison’s arm, uneasy with the frenzied activities of the paparazzi around her. In was almost inevitable, in retrospect, that cracks would begin to appear in Mary and Harrison’s relationship.

‘I wasn’t prepared,’ said Ford, ‘either by experience, maturity or disposition to be a good husband or good father the first time around. I wasn’t easy to live with. I was bitter and cynical.’

When the separation came in 1978, Harrison and Mary kept the split amicable. Ford felt he could do no less. ‘I owe everything to Mary,’ he told an interviewer. ‘Without her, I wouldn’t be in the cinema today, because I wouldn’t have accepted the role of Han Solo. When Lucas made me the offer, I hadn’t been in front of a camera for three years. Mary wasn’t only beautiful and kind, she gave me the confidence to accept. She pushed me back into the cinema.’

Ford voiced his regret when he said, ‘The cinema separated us, and I will never forgive it for that.’

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

One of the post-Star Wars projects you’ll never see mentioned in any interview with Harrison Ford is probably one of the most entertaining, for all the wrong reasons: The Star Wars Holiday Special.

For some reason, probably the insistence of Fox executives that the studio needed something Star Wars on tv during the run-up to Christmas, George Lucas okayed the making of the Holiday Special, then somehow managed to get most of the cast to agree to appear. And that was when Lucas wisely took a step back from this project and left Ford, Fisher, Hammill et al to make the best of it. Merry Christmas, guys ...

The Star Wars Holiday Special - probably the worst tv show ever.

It’s proved nigh impossible to track down any solid information about the hows and whys of the making of this tv terror. Those who appeared in it will not even admit to its existence. Questioned about it at a science fiction convention in Australia a few years later, Lucas remarked, ‘if I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every bootlegged copy of that program and smash it.’

However, a little diligence and fifteen minutes searching the DVD section of eBay allowed me to buy a copy on disk. And guess what? The Star Wars Holiday Special is everything you’ve heard and more.

Far and away the worst aspect is the interminable framing interludes with Chewbacca’s Wookiee family, conducted entirely in the Wookiee language (no subtitles) with the ill- considered help of character actor Art Carney and Blazing Saddles star Harvey Korman (in drag, no less). These sequences appear to have been shot live with multiple cameras, a common tv technique at the time, but the pace is leaden, making the scenes seem to run far longer than they actually do.

There are some non sequitur contributions from rock band Jefferson Starship (chosen no doubt more because of their cosmic-sounding name than for any suitability of their music) and a weird ‘man’s entertainment’ video watched by Granpa Wookiee which features hot star of the period Diahann Carroll.

It’s not all dreadful – balancing the appalling cantina sequence, with The Golden Girls’ Bea Arthur as the bar tender, is the moderately interesting animated sequence which introduces mercenary Boba Fett for the first time.

The grim Wookiee framing sequence is brought to its long overdue climax when Han Solo and Chewbacca show up and pitch an Imperial Stormtrooper over the balcony of the Wookiee home – then Carrie Fisher sings a song which sets a string of platitudes to the tune of the Star Wars theme.

Based on this and the trance-like appearances by the other Star Wars principle actors, you could be forgiven for thinking that Ford, Fisher and Hammill had been blackmailed into appearing in this travesty, so flat are their performances.

By the end of the treacle-like 97 minutes, you’ll be ready to cheerfully strangle anyone who wishes you a Happy Life Day.

A bit of a bonus for me was the inclusion on the disk of some original Kenner toy ads from the period – no real connection to the Star Wars Holiday Special, though you can be sure that the audience of the show was bombarded with commercials not unlike these ...

GO WEST

Towards the end of 1978 Harrison Ford, unlike Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher, had not signed up before Star Wars for all three movies, but he had agreed to appear in The Empire Strikes Back. Ford had negotiated with George Lucas for better terms. He also wanted to see the character of Han Solo become ‘more dashing’. Lucas agreed readily to the terms, although, in the end, Ford ended up making no more than his two co-stars from the Star Wars sequel.

In the meantime, Ford had just time for one more movie before returning to the camp of George Lucas, The Frisco Kid.

The project had originally come up during the filming of Heroes. In his interview in Playboy for August 1977, Henry Winkler mentioned that he was considering an oddball buddy movie called, at that time, "No Knife", about an immigrant Hasidic rabbi crossing America from East to West to set up a rabbinate in San Francisco, helped along the way by a bandit with a heart of gold. Although it wasn’t made clear which role he was considering, it was pretty unlikely that he was considering the role of the Rabbi. What wasn’t mentioned was that director Aldrich’s first choice for the role – indeed the actor he had in mind while he was pulling the project together – was the legendary cowboy John Wayne. But rumour has it that an over-zealous studio exec tried to bargain with Wayne’s agent over Wayne’s fee, causing Wayne to drop out.

Finally, Winkler too passed up the role, though Gene Wilder, already a pretty big star with films like Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and Silver Streak behind him, was signed for the part of Avram, the trainee rabbi.

It’s not such a stretch to deduce that Winkler mentioned he was dropping out of the project during the filming of Heroes and suggested Ford take the Tommy Lillard role.

What is surprising is that a usually reliable director like Robert Aldrich could turn out such a turkey of a movie. Yet in the film business you’re only as good as your last picture and the critics were unimpressed by such earlier Aldrich credits as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Dirty Dozen. Said one reviewer, ‘Aldrich is stuck up the wrong turning he took with The Choirboys. Like that film, The Frisco Kid is based on the dangerous assumption that a number of comic episodes will add up to a comedy ... one only hopes that his itch for comedy has been well and truly scratched.’ It’s been suggested by some film commentators that because Aldrich fashioned the project with Wayne in mind for the Tommy Lilliard role, he was depressed and disappointed when his first choice of star dropped out and took his disappointment out on Ford.

Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford make an unlikely comedy duo in Frisco Kid.

Ford’s thoughts about his involvement in the project have passed unrecorded, but The Frisco Kid will go down on record as the last of the films of this period that Ford should never have been involved in.

Over the next rise was Ford’s return to the role that had made him a household name a few years earlier ... Han Solo.

HARRISON AND MELISSA

With the break up of his marriage to Mary, Ford had to find a new home. Not far from the residence of Fred Roos, Ford saw the house he was looking for – a well-constructed 1941 clapboard dwelling that he could work and rework until it was the perfect reflection of the American classic style that Ford had grown up with.

The other big change in Ford’s life as 1978 drew to a close was his deepening friendship with Melissa Mathison. A year earlier, during the publicity tour for Star Wars, Ford had met up with his old friend Fred Roos who was producing The Black Stallion for Francis Coppola in Toronto. Also at the dinner was the screenwriter Melissa Mathison, whom Ford had met in passing in the Philippines during the shooting of Apocalypse Now.

Melissa had been a journalist, working for People magazine, then was offered a job as an assistant on The Godfather Part II through a family connection with the Coppolas. It was Francis Coppola who encouraged Melissa to move from journalism into screenwriting, culminating in an assignment to re-write the script for The Black Stallion.

Ford and Mathison were seeing each other regularly during the filming of The Frisco Kid. In fact, Ford had asked Kid producer Mace Neufeld to look at some of Mathison’s work. Neufeld would come to regret not taking Ford’s advice when Mathison later wrote the screenplay for ET, a film that went on to out-gross Star Wars.

Chapter 3, Part 1 - Harrison Ford: New Directions

From Star Wars to Wars Star

‘When I saw Star Wars before it was released, I realised the power of it as a piece of film-making, and set out deliberately to try to do something that would contrast with the character of Han Solo.’ Harrison Ford

The principal photography of Star Wars was completed in the August of 1976. It would be nine months before the movie was dropped on an unsuspecting American public. But Harrison Ford didn’t sit around and wait for success to come to him. The role in Star Wars was his biggest achievement in the eleven years he had been in movies. He was aware that Han Solo had been a major role in a major film. If he was to avoid the typecasting he feared would follow in the wake of Star Wars he had to make his move immediately. He cast around for a part that would avoid the flippant derring-do of the Solo character, and found it in a rather grim tv horror movie, The Possessed (1977). Starring James Farentino, the film was a cynical reworking of some of the themes from 1973’s The Exorcist, pitting Farentino’s unfrocked priest against a bunch of demons in a girls’ boarding school. Ford played the cool biology teacher all the girls had a crush on.

Ford looks fresh-faced in the Exorcist knock-off, The Possessed.

Harrison Ford’s next film role was yet another piece of space filling, which he did at the request of his old friend Fred Roos. Francis Coppola was about to begin work on his latest project, a Vietnam war tale which had been written by John Milius and had originally been slated to be directed by George Lucas as a ‘mockumentary’ on location in Vietnam while the conflict was in full effect. As it worked out, Lucas had stepped aside and Coppola himself ended up in the director’s chair. The film was the now-legendary Apocalypse Now, which was shot in the Phillipines and starred Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando and Robert Duvall.

‘My scene was shared with Martin Sheen,’ recalls Ford. ‘It wasn’t a big role for me, just a nine-day cameo as a US Army Intelligence Colonel. I had my hair cut short and presented another image, Vietnam style.’

As, perhaps, a tip of the director’s hat to Lucas’s early involvement in the movie, Coppola had Harrison Ford’s character wear a name-tag on his uniform which read ‘Col G. Lucas’.

Ford was almost unrecognisable as "Col G.Lucas" in Apocalypse Now.

‘It’s just the one scene,’ says Ford, ‘the laundry list scene – it told the audience all they needed to know for the rest of the movie. And when George (Lucas) saw it, the scene was half-way over before he recognised me. That was exactly the way I wanted it.’

When asked by writer Tony Crawley how he would compare Lucas and Coppola as filmmakers, Ford replied, ‘It’s really presumptuous for an actor to get into that kind of discussion. More so for me, I’m not intellectually equipped to make such judgements. Let’s see – they both have beards and glasses, and a difference in personality. I know what the differences are, but it would take me about two days to explain it. Certainly, they both allow their actors enormous freedom. Francis lets you make a choice and then moves everything to support you, to make it work for you. He’s really delightful.’

But as much as Ford may have enjoyed the experience, brief as it was, on Apocalypse Now, it was still really only walk-on cameo. Word of Ford’s performance in Star Wars must have been getting around, because Ford was offered a meaty supporting role in a middleweight Hollywood movie called Heroes.

Heroes was the film which marked the big-screen debut of Henry Winkler. Winkler had shot to fame in the phenomenally successful Happy Days tv series. It's commonly believed that Happy Days was based, unofficially, on American Graffiti. However, the basis for Happy Days was an episode of top-rated tv show Love, American Style ("Love and the Happy Days", 25 Feb 1972) that aired before Lucas' film went into production. In any case, Winkler had grown tired of being so irreversibly identified with ‘The Fonz’ and had selected Heroes for his escape from television. 

The story concerned the uncertain adventures of a returning Vietnam veteran, whose ambition it is to set up a worm farm in Nowheresville, California, and his relationships with his best pal (Harrison Ford) and his girl (Sally Field). Jeremy Paul Kagan was the director.

Ford had the thankless task of playing Henry Winkler's best buddy in Heroes.

‘I did Heroes for short money,’ says Ford. ‘It wasn’t a big part, and I wasn’t paid big money.’

The filming of Heroes was straightforward enough except for one hiccup which involved Harrison Ford and occurred before even a foot of film had run through the cameras.

‘Ten days before shooting Heroes,’ recalls Ford, ‘Jeremy changed my character from a mid-Western to a Missouri farm-boy. So off I went to Missouri with a tape-recorder to learn the accent. I bummed around for about three days and went and met the actual type I was going to play – a guy interested in cars. I went into an auto-part store and told them I was a writer because if you tell them you’re an actor, you spend the rest of the time talking about movies – and it also puts a certain distance between you and them.’

When it was released, Heroes proved not to be the cinema box-office success Henry Winkler was looking for. The film was over-long and patchy and sank without a trace.

‘It was a good part,’ says Ford philosophically, ‘but Henry Winkler was the real star of the film.’ His next role, as the American Ranger Lieutenant-Colonel Barnsby in Force Ten From Navarone, brought him a little closer to centre-stage.

LEARNING THE WAYS OF THE FORCE
Taking the role in Force Ten From Navarone was probably one of the sounder career decisions made by Harrison Ford during the period that immediately followed Star Wars. Although it was another supporting role, the fact that it was a major Hollywood style movie made it preferable to a leading role in a small independent production.

‘It’s fun to do those supporting roles, because they’re good character pieces,’ Ford pointed out to an interviewer. ‘The problem is that they don’t usually write character parts as the leads of the movies. Unfortunately, you can’t always play the supporting roles because of the complicated vision that people in this industry have. Hollywood only really takes notice when you’re being paid the money and given the billing that a “lead actor” gets. That’s why Force Ten from Navarone was important for me to do. Its cast was a “package of big names” which included me.’

Force Ten from Navarone was a belated sequel to the 1961 war adventure The Guns of Navarone and tells how the only survivors of the first adventure, Major Mallory (here played by Robert Shaw) and Sergeant Miller (Edward Fox) are sent to Yugoslavia with Lt Col Mike Barnsby (Harrison Ford) and his squad of US Rangers to find and eliminate Nicolai Lescovar, the German spy who sabotaged the original mission and who is now posing as a Yugoslavian resistance fighter.

Ford must have seen something in the character he could work with. In a press junket interview before the film was released, he did talk about the character as though he respected the kind of person Barnsby was. ‘He’s a man of real capacity. He flies, he fights, he’s got brains, but everything works against him. At the last minute he gets the Robert Shaw and James Fox characters tacked onto his mission, so there’s a lot of adversity in the relationship between them, until he begins to need them and they begin to need him – a nice kind of continuity of cross purposes that become established and finally resolved. An interesting character. I think it’ll work.’

Ford didn't really have much to work with in the humourless
role of Barnsby in Force Ten from Navarone.

When Force Ten from Navarone was released it wasn’t well received by the critics, though Playboy’s Bruce Williamson gave the film a cautious thumbs-up, saying, ‘Guy Hamilton builds Force Ten into a straightforward, man-size adventure – a nostalgic toast to the good old war years, when we unequivocally rooted for our side to win.’

The Monthly Film Bulletin was less charitable. ‘Leadenly scripted and directed, this rather belated sequel to The Guns of Navarone is depressingly short on thrills and almost completely lacking in suspense.’

For me the biggest problem was the clash between ex-Bond helmer Guy Hamilton’s decidedly old-fashioned movie-making style (even more so when you compare it to George Lucas’ staging and direction on Star Wars, filmed a year or two earlier) and the very contemporary acting style of Ford, clearly ahead of his time and waiting for the rest of the movie industry to catch up with him.

Ford is the first to admit that there wasn’t very much in Force Ten from Navarone he could work on. ‘Mike Barnsby was one of those macho, tough-guy parts that everyone thought I should be doing.’ He expanded on this in another post release interview. ‘Force Ten from Navarone was an attempt, in a way, to objectify the success of Star Wars. It wasn’t a personal success for me. It was George’s movie, his success. Nonetheless, I wanted to take advantage of the chance to work. And it was a job I did for the money. And I was lost, because I didn’t know what the story was about. I didn’t have anything to act. There was no reason for my character being there. I had no part of the story that was important to tell. I had a hard time taking the stage with the bull that I was supposed to be doing. I can’t do that, and I won’t ever do that again. It wasn’t a bad film. There were honest people involved making an honest effort. But it wasn’t the right thing for me to do.’