Is there a more iconic Harrison Ford role than Indiana Jones, the bullwhip-snapping, fedora-clad, globe-trotting archeologist who fights Nazis and pillages artifacts from their cultures of origin, which was the style at the time? It can be difficult to step back from this movie’s cultural primacy and just watch it as a movie. When you do, it’s an adventuresome thrill ride, impeccably made, as…
Show notes
Is there a more iconic Harrison Ford role than Indiana Jones, the bullwhip-snapping, fedora-clad, globe-trotting archeologist who fights Nazis and pillages artifacts from their cultures of origin, which was the style at the time? It can be difficult to step back from this movie’s cultural primacy and just watch it as a movie. When you do, it’s an adventuresome thrill ride, impeccably made, as Indy and his pal's zip from one precarious encounter to another. Part of the charm is Harrison Ford’s portrayal of Indiana Jones, toeing the line between heroic and roguish, and - unlike modern action stars - often surprised by the peril in which he finds himself and occasionally in danger of getting badly injured or even dead. But is Indiana Jones, as a character, the hero we are led to believe? Or is he, as Hemal maintains, “like every bad boyfriend you’ve ever had”? In this episode, Hemal and Brian also interrogate the ideological valence of the film, from the troubling way in which Marion Ravenwood, the movie’s sole woman character (played with delightful grit and humor by the underrated Karen Allen) is portrayed and treated, to the questionable choice of having the film’s Egyptian and Nepali characters played by white guys - including John Rhys-Davies, noted Welshman, as Indy’s loyal and resourceful sidekick Sallah Mohammed Faisel el-Kahir. Though it must be admitted, we also thoroughly enjoyed Rhys-Davies in the role. Do we contradict ourselves? Very well then, we contradict ourselves. We are large, we contain multitudes.
Harrison Ford had it all - a beautiful wife, a flourishing medical career and a big chunky beard. But then a sinister one-armed man murdered his wife and the bumbling cop blamed him and he had no choice but to become The Fugitive. Being The Fugitive is a tough business. He spends most of the movie running around Chicago being resourceful - forging documents, stealing other documents, and looking…
3 yrs ago · 31:36
Exciting? Certainly. Preposterous? Absolutely. But will you enjoy Harrison Ford as the president of the United States, personally karate-fighting and machine-gunning an array of sneering terrorists who have seized his airplane? If you are a good American, you will. In ‘Air Force One’, a 1997 action thriller, a band of evil Russian separatists takes over the president’s very special airplane with…
3 yrs ago · 33:26
Though we know him more for action and adventure roles, Harrison Ford has been known to try his hand at a romantic comedy or two. Turns out that craggy handsomeness and twinkle-eyed charm are just as useful for wooing the ladies as it is for fending off space aliens. In ‘Working Girl', Melanie Griffith plays a gritty outer-borough striver who decides to perpetrate identity fraud to get ahead in…
3 yrs ago · 42:54
If you’re keen on unspoken but palpable yearning, ‘Witness’ will be right up your alley. If, on the other hand, you enjoy things happening, this may not be the movie for you. In ‘Witness’, the first of Harrison Ford’s two mid-80s outings with director Peter Weir, our hero plays a gritty Philadelphia detective who has to hole up at a remote farmstead in Amish country and spend most of the movie…
3 yrs ago · 37:32
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