“We’re all…fine…here now…” from Star Wars (1977)

With a new Star Wars film opening this week, I thought I would take a moment to celebrate a Small Moment from the original film — Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977).

It’s not a lightsabre duel. It’s not a deep-space dogfight or exploding planet. It’s just a little moment of levity in a film that is, on the whole, not really remembered for its sense of humour.

George Lucas is justly celebrated for his kinetic camera and his unerring sense of spectacle, as well as his close study of the writings of Joseph Campbell on Myth. Even his most ardent fans might concede, however, that he did have something of a tin ear for dialogue.

I remember playing Star Wars as a kid, and although my friends and I might reference a lot of particular scenes and play with/as certain memorable characters, we didn’t spend a lot of time quoting individual lines from the films. This ain’t Casablanca.

Harrison Ford was famously not the biggest fan of Lucas’s writing style. His attitude is captured beautifully in the deathless quote, supposedly spoken to Lucas on the set as a complaint about a particularly clunky line, “You can type this shit, George, but you sure as hell can’t say it.” And can’t you just picture him saying that, maybe near the end of a long tiring day? His grumpy cadence and laconic sneer? Whether or not he actually said it is besides the point — it feels true.

As Ford has aged into a curmudgeonly old coot (glittery earring aside), it is easy to forget that he can be a wonderfully witty screen presence. He was never cast in an out-and-out comedy (perhaps the closest thing to a comedy in his filmography is 1988’s Working Girl) but he did bring a wry comedic sparkle to many of his more serious roles.

I have a particular fondness for a moment in the otherwise deadpan Witness (1985) when his character John Book, a gruff Philadelphia cop, is seated at breakfast with the Amish family he is protecting, and after taking a sip of coffee he breaks into the cheesiest of pitchman grins, holds up his cup, points to it, and loudly announces “Honey, that’s GREAT coffee!” Moments like these play off his stolid good looks and almost wooden demeanour, throwing the character — just for a moment — into sharp relief.

Which brings us to the SMBM I’ve selected from Star Wars. As Han, Luke and Chewie force their way into the detention block to rescue Leia, they have a fierce firefight with a group of guards.

After the smoke clears, Han jumps on the mic to try downplaying the incident and avoid the dispatch of reinforcements. The resulting exchange is, just possibly, my favourite moment in the movie. (It starts at about 2:15 in this video).

It works because Ford sells it so well. One story from the set has it that Ford deliberately didn’t remember his actual line, as a way of heightening the awkwardness of the moment. The whole point here is that this is a moment of improvisation — maybe the only one in a film that is otherwise very locked down, storyboarded to within an inch of its life. Ford’s stammering “Everything’s perfectly all right. We’re fine. We’re all fine…here….now” lets a little air into the scene, and into the film as a whole. And his pained wince after “How are you?” just gets me every time. It’s as if Ford the actor and Han Solo the character are both acutely aware, at the same moment, of how wrong the line sounds.

The momentum of the sequence bulldozes ahead, and before we know it we’re in a hallway shootout that leads us down into the trash compactor. Throughout this sequence, Ford’s Solo is quipping pretty hard (“He’s the brains, sweetheart!” or “One thing’s for sure, we’re all gonna be a lot thinner”) but those lines come more from a place of power — the exchange over the intercom comes from a different place, a place of awkwardness and vulnerability. And as a young Star Wars fan, awkwardness and vulnerability were right in my wheelhouse. Maybe that’s why this Small Moment stands out to me so clearly. Even if only for a second, Han Solo…c’est moi.