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Ford’s scene is simple and relatively unimportant. He is a clean bellboy charged with delivering a message to a “Mr. Ellis.” After repeating “Paging Mr. Ellis” several times, Coburn called him over. Alas, the message is for another Mr. Ellis. (If this scene sounds familiar, that’s because it was teased at the end of “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” the difference here being that Ford wasn’t overdubbed by another actor.)
Ford’s mistake was overplaying his close-up. He plays the bellboy as a nervous boy whose expression ranges from relief to exasperation. It wasn’t entirely his fault. Working teachers tell their students to play bold acts, but the studio isn’t looking for the next Laurence Olivier here; they want to see the works of a movie star. So when Jerry Tarkovsky, the no-nonsense executive minding the store for Columbia in Hollywood at the time, looked at the scene, he was not pleased. As Brad Duke explains in his book “Harrison Ford: The Movies:”
“The executive went on to tell Ford the story of the first time anyone saw Tony Curtis. In Curtis’ debut film, he was charged with the simple job of delivering a bag of groceries. The talent scout watching the delivery boy it made the difference that Curtis was in fact not a delivery boy as he was supposed to portray, but was in fact a real movie star.
Stunned, Ford leaned back and said he thought Curtis should act like a grocery delivery boy – and not a movie star.”
Oops.
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