For those that are looking forward to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as some sort of zenith of the life and career of Richard Harris, I say slap yourselves with bricks, you mindless idiots. If anything, it's going to be a letdown and a blot on his legacy, just as the first movie is.
Turn off the TV, close the AOL Time Warner Popup windows of mourning, get a goddamned grip, and take a breath.
Richard Harris had the ability to take any role, small or large, and make you believe that the character had a life before the picture and was a whole entity. Whether the fullness of life of that character came from Harris' own lust for life (like Oliver Reed, Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton) or from his acting ability, go off in the corner and debate amongst yourselves. Despite being hopeless drunks, these men could make you believe the characters were hopeless drunks from the performances they brought.
I don't even have to go all that far back to condemn Chris Columbus and his Harry Potter directoral disasters with examples of Richard Harris' greatness. Let A Man Called Horse sit on the pedestal for now while I pull out bit parts and supporting roles than demonstrate where you shouldn't take the studio's bait into thinking your ten bucks will be a tribute to Richard Harris.
- In Gladiator, he took the role of "tired old dying man" and made you believe that the character was exhausted and worn-out from years of life and responsibility, not because Richard Harris himself could have been old and tired and going through the motions for the paycheck. You got the feeling that he'd spent the past few decades ruling Rome, had clung on to life and power longer than he'd wanted to because he had nobody to hand it over to, and that even that reserve of will was leaking from him.
- In Patriot Games, you've got the sleazy evil terrorist fundraiser hopping from bar to bar, the apologist mouthpiece playing human for the cameras but shedding his mask when the lights are out. The press greedily gobbles up his witty rejoinders and denials in the movie just as they do with the PLO spokesmen who deny responsibility for suicide bombings and then crawl back in their holes to sign more checks for training and explosives.
- In Unforgiven, you've got him at his most fucked up and most powerful. A cocky gunslinger with a reputation as long as legend comes in to play hero for a bunch of wronged whores, only to get brutalized, beaten, and sent packing without his pet minstrel. Unlike some cookie-cutter stereotype of a gunslinger getting the crap kicked out of him and then on to the next scene, we felt every blow, felt sorry for the man, felt his fall... and then felt the shock as Gene Hackman's character tore away his last shreds of dignity by exposing him for a fraud.
Richard Harris represented the audience in that movie without heroes, and the torture he endured was felt by all of us as all of our built-up illusions of Hollywood Westerns were ripped away by the brutal reality Clint Eastwood was trying to demonstrate.
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