If you caught Witness in a movie theater back in 1985, you already know what all the fuss is about. If you missed it, here is your reminder that it is very much worth finding.
Rotten Tomatoes recently ranked it number 37 on their list of the 185 best movies of the entire 1980s. The film earned a 92 percent score on the Tomatometer, which measures the share of positive reviews from critics. The site called it a “wonderfully entertaining thriller within an unusual setting.”
The film website Collider went even further, calling Witness “one of the greatest thrillers ever made.”
What the Movie Is About
Directed by Australian filmmaker Peter Weir, Witness runs 112 minutes and takes a story that could have been a standard police thriller somewhere more interesting. Harrison Ford plays Detective John Book, a Philadelphia cop assigned to a murder case with an unusual witness, an eight-year-old Amish boy named Samuel, who saw a drug-related killing at a train station.
Things get complicated fast. Book figures out that the killers are corrupt police officers trying to bury a corruption investigation. He goes on the run, hiding out with the boy and his widowed mother in Amish country. What unfolds is part crime story, part culture clash, part character study.
Rotten Tomatoes praised Ford specifically for a “surprisingly emotive and sympathetic performance”, a side of him that fans of the Indiana Jones films may not have expected.
A Hit at the Box Office and at the Oscars
The film opened to real commercial success. It earned more than $68 million domestically against a reported production budget of $12 million. That is a strong return for a movie that could have been a modest thriller.
Come awards season, Hollywood took notice. Witness received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Film Editing. It also earned Ford his first and only nomination for Best Actor.
Out of those eight nominations, the film won two Oscars, Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing.
What Ford Said About Making It
In a recent interview with Variety, Ford looked back on the production with clear affection. The shoot had almost no runway, very little pre-production time before cameras rolled.
Rather than seeing that as a problem, Ford and director Peter Weir used the pressure creatively. Weir spent two weeks learning about Amish culture. Ford spent the same time researching police work. They came back together, shared what they had found, and those discoveries were written directly into the script.
“The role was fantastic. I got to work with Peter Weir. What I loved about the movie was that we had a very, very short period of pre-production. Peter knew nothing of the Amish, so he went away to learn about the Amish, and I went away to research the police. And we came back together two weeks after that and discussed what we learned. And that was included in the rewrite. I love that kind of tension that we were under, we didn’t really have the script entirely figured out, so we left a couple of big holes in it when we started. I felt really good about the film we were making, and the film was quite a success.”
As for the Oscar nomination, Ford said he was “pleased” that the Academy recognized the performance.
Forty-one years on, Witness is still being watched, still being ranked, and still earning praise. Some movies just hold up. This is one of them.
