SAME OLD FORD

By Gene Seymour

SPECIAL TO NEWSDAY

NEW YORK - With most of our action movie icons, there are easily identifiable trademarks: John Wayne's pigeon-toed swagger and slow- rolling drawl. Clint Eastwood's narrow squints and freeze-dried rasp. Drop Gary Cooper's laconic fortitude, Robert Mitchum's sloe- eyed diffidence and Charles Bronson's brawny truculence into this discussion, and you can summon waves of other examples.

Harrison Ford? What is it that jumps out in front of you when thinking of one of the biggest action stars of the past 30- something years? What would your garden-variety Vegas comic use as fodder for a Harrison Ford impression? Besides a bullwhip or a ray gun? Can't think of any, right? Neither can we.

You really have to reach to find an idiosyncrasy in Ford that can be stretched to satiric excess. Still, it's just possible that Ford's lack of a conspicuous trademark has helped extend his capital as an action hero well into the 21st century.

Today, a couple of months shy of his 66th birthday, Ford returns in what may well be his most indelible cinematic incarnation in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." This is the fourth time Ford has taken up the battered fedora, leather jacket and that aforementioned bullwhip of his two-fisted archaeologist alter-ego - and the first time in almost 20 years.

You'd think if director Steven Spielberg and company wanted to jump-start this franchise after such a long interval, they could have found someone younger to wear Indiana Jones' costume. Apparently, this wasn't close to being an option. And it shouldn't have been.

Who else could best enact the role of someone suddenly confronted with overwhelming odds but ruggedly equipped to overcome them with seat-of-the-pants aplomb?

OK, Bruce Willis does that, too, though his hipper, flashier approach offers a greater contrast to Ford's more stolid action archetype. What's more, Ford can slip into self-deprecation a lot easier than Willis can maintain a straight face for a whole movie.

And where Willis got a head start from TV stardom, Ford's emergence from the shadow land of walk-ons and secondary roles in such movies as "American Graffiti" (1973) and "Apocalypse Now" (1979) makes his ascent into stardom almost as wildly improbable as one of Indiana Jones' hairbreadth escapes.

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