Harrison Ford’s Best Movie Performance Isn't What You Think

Witness Was Harrison Ford's Sole Oscar-Nominated Performance

Witness, released in 1985, tells the story of an Amish community sucked into a diabolical conspiracy. The film opens with the Amish in mourning. The husband of Rachel Lapp (played by Kelly McGillis) has passed away, leaving her to raise her son, Samuel (Lukas Haas) with her father-in-law, Eli. Days after the procession, Rachel and Samuel head to the city to visit her sister.

They arrive in Philadelphia to a world that's totally alien to young Samuel, who is enraptured by the classical scale of the train station. While on a trip to the bathroom, Samuel witnesses a shocking crime - the murder of a man who we soon learn was an undercover cop. Samuel escapes to be interrogated by Book, who, while at first struggling to connect with his Amish witnesses, eventually discovers with their help that the men who committed the murder were cops themselves, and the conspiracy implicates Ford's old mentor, who is now the chief of police. (The moment where Samuel fingers Danny Glover's Lieutenant McFee as the culprit is hair-raisingly good - a slow, dawning exchange accentuated by Maurice Jarre's ghostly score.)

This leads to Book being targeted and, although not his intention, go into hiding with the Amish. Rachel and the village doctor take care of him as he builds his strength back up, with Ford and McGillis developing a chemistry predicated on curiosity as much as it is raw attraction. Book is now in a different world, one with its own rules and language, in an ingenious reversal of the earlier fish-out-of-water aspect where the Lapps were in Philadelphia.