The night after Glenn Frey died, in January 2016, Bruce Springsteen played the United Center in Chicago. He opened his encore with the Eagles’ first hit. Forty-four years after “Take It Easy” debuted on the radio, with Frey on lead vocals, 20,000 Springsteen fans who didn’t know what was coming sang along to every indelible word. Like so many of the Eagles’ songs, “Take It Easy” is burned into the national memory and instantly evocative of sunny Southern California—to say nothing of Winslow, Arizona—in a distant decade that the Eagles made their own. “His songs, those sounds, perfectly captured those days,” as Bette Midler said of Frey and the band he cofounded. “ ’70s L.A.”
Frey was from Michigan. His bandmates came from Texas, Nebraska, Ohio, and Florida. The Eagles recorded most of their hits in London and Miami. And yet they somehow became the quintessential California band, their music navigating dark desert highways, tequila sunrises, and young women holed up in houses with rich old men. Take it easy? The Eagles failed to follow their own advice. They had glorious harmonies on records that concealed chronic disharmony on tours. Those tours left in their wake a trail of splintered hotel furniture and bathtubs full of Budweiser.
And yet with those songs, and on those tours, the Eagles conquered the world. Fifty years after the band formed, there is a Hotel California on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, a Hotel California on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, and an Otel’ Kaliforniya on a less glamorous thoroughfare in Moscow. Their checkout policies are less inflexible than the one in the song, whose mirrored ceilings and pink champagne on ice are repeated on the radio every hour somewhere in America. But their allure is undimmed by age.
The Eagles are nearly as ubiquitous now, in the streaming era, as they were a half-century ago. Frey’s writing partner and Eagles cofounder Don Henley was raised in Texas on country and western. Frey, from Detroit, grew up on Motown, with a twist of bar-rock anthems courtesy of his early mentor, Bob Seger. That alchemy—a country-rock alloy—became the Eagles’ sound when Frey and Henley met in Southern California, starting a partnership that would dominate the 1970s the way two other singer-songwriters had done the previous decade. “[Frey] and Henley were America’s answer to Lennon and McCartney,” the country singer Clint Black said, and McCartney himself remains a fan, pumping his fists for the Eagles at their last concert at Madison Square Garden in 2020, just before the pandemic shut down live events.
Another fan, Jimmy Buffett, calls the Eagles the best American band of his generation, and they are certainly the most popular, with their first greatest-hits album selling 38 million copies and Hotel California selling 26 million copies in the United States, an absurd feat for any band—but for the Eagles, that was just 1976, when both LPs were released. In America’s bicentennial year, the Eagles were unquestionably America’s band, named for America’s national emblem, with songs that played into the American impulse to move west, to a promised land, ideally in a muscle car with an eagle-like bird emblazoned on the hood.
The Eagles were (and remain) the sound of Los Angeles in the early 1970s, when Billy Joel moved there from New York. “The Eagles pretty much represented that Southern California thing, like the Beach Boys used to do, and then I found out later you were from Texas,” Joel once said to Henley, who—like almost all of his bandmates—had moved to the Golden State from somewhere else, making the band at once quintessentially Californian and quintessentially American.
“It’s the sound of not just a California band but one of America’s signature bands,” as President Barack Obama put it when honoring the Eagles at the White House in 2016. The band—like the sound and songs they created—endures 50 years after it formed. Their songs issue from taxicabs in Auckland and karaoke bars in Tokyo and tribute bands in London. But Bette Midler pinpointed where and when the Eagles’ story began, and where it reached its fullest expression: in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
At the Grammys in February 15, 2016, the Eagles (joined by Jackson Browne, center) performed “Take it Easy” in tribute to Glenn Frey, who had died on January 18 at age 67 of complications from rheumatoid arthritis, acute ulcerative colitis, and pneumonia.
Photo by Cliff Lipson/CBS via Getty Images
Deacon Frey, son of Glenn Frey, performed during the Eagles’ first-ever concert at the Grand Ole Opry House on October 29, 2017 in Nashville.
From that first stunning address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, the speech that launched him into national consciousness, Barack Obama made clear his yearning for a new kind of politics that would galvanize a fresh generation of voters. His white American mother and Black African father had “shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation,” he told the crowd to rousing response. They passed that faith on to him, and it stuck.
Between that speech and now, as America’s 44th president turns 60 and cultivates a post–White House life, Obama changed the United States, and the world. His legacy evolves, along with the evolving vantage point of history.
Obama’s election to the presidency “would mean . . . that the America I believed in was possible, that the democracy I believed in was within reach,” he wrote in his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, “ . . . that I wasn’t alone in believing that the world didn’t have to be a cold, unforgiving place, where the strong preyed on the weak and we inevitably fell back into clans and tribes.”
In terms of his character and temperament, there are points on which nearly everyone can agree. Obama was intelligent, restrained, dignified. An idealist, to be sure. A loving husband and father. Certainly, someone deeply dedicated to the mission he had been called to serve.
As he was the first African American president this country has seen, his presence and power in the White House were symbolic as well as actual, his identity embodying a part of our national identity that was messy and not easily defined. “Because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled,” Obama wrote, “I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast.”
That so many Americans embraced this man with a Muslim-sounding name, with all of his unknowns and aspirations, said something profound. His complicated background and experiences reminded us that America is full of contradiction and disappointment, but also hope. He was nothing if not the collective mirror we held up to remind ourselves not to succumb to cynicism.
Barack Obama never believed that his presidency would lead to a post-racial America. After all, this was a man who was placed under round-the-clock security by the Secret Service earlier in the campaign than any presidential candidate before him. Obama was not naive about racism. He simply refused to give in to it.
His tenure in the White House mattered not only in figurative terms but in concrete policy measures. He appointed the country’s first two Black attorneys general and instituted criminal justice reforms to address racial disparities impacting Black and brown people. He added more than 100 federal judges of color to the bench and nominated Sonia Sotomayor as Supreme Court justice, the first Latina to serve in that capacity.
Still, he refused to cast himself as only a “Black president” and was intent on being a bridge that could unite us all. In many ways, he did just that. Obama consistently won white voters, claiming nine states in 2008 that had voted Republican in 2004. His presidential campaigns registered thousands of young people and people of color—new voters who previously had been disengaged. Many white citizens of traditionally red rural districts cast their ballots for him. His open-arms approach to the electorate was a stance for which he received some criticism from African Americans, but not enough to dent his Gallup poll approval rating among Black voters, which remained in the 80-90 percent range throughout his eight years in office.
Politically, Obama’s accomplishments were numerous and varied, the most significant of them arguably being the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It provided health coverage to 20 million people, including 4 million Hispanic people and 3 million African Americans. As Thomas Holt, a University of Chicago professor emeritus of American and African American history, has described it, passage of the ACA placed Obama in the same historical ranks as Franklin D. Roosevelt for instituting Social Security and Lyndon B. Johnson for Medicare.
With that one victory, Obama achieved what generations of Democratic presidents had tried and failed to do. That such a feat was grounded in mostly moderate measures—such as allowing adult children to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26 and not denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions—often gets lost in translation.
Obama will also be remembered for rescuing the country from the brink of financial disaster, as the economic meltdown he inherited upon taking office was the worst America had faced since the Great Depression—with an unemployment rate that had reached 10 percent and thousands of foreclosures forced by the collapse of the housing market. Almost immediately as president, Obama put in place the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a stimulus package containing $787 billion in tax cuts and spending. The legislation, ultimately credited with saving some 2.5 million American jobs, was passed without a single Republican vote in the House.
Among Obama’s environmental actions, the Paris Agreement often gets top billing, but there is more to his record on climate change, according to political journalist Jonathan Darman, who in a New York magazine Q&A cited “tough EPA constraints on coal, a meaningful accord with China to cut emissions, serious stimulus spending on clean energy, new emissions standards for cars and trucks.” Darman added, “History may well reveal that Obama showed more personal courage on this issue than any other.”
In his final speech in office, Obama included other accomplishments in his tally, reminding us that his administration saw the dawn of a new era with Cuba after 55 years of discord, that under his leadership military forces took out Osama bin Laden, that he succeeded in bringing marriage equality to LGBTQ couples, and that he was responsible for shutting down Iran’s nuclear weapons program “without firing a shot.”
Despite these many successes, a cloud loomed over his presidency. Obama watched a rising tide of right-wing extremism take hold across the country, a trend with roots in economic insecurity, fear of demographic shifts, and resentment over immigration—and in the election of Obama. The President seemed helpless to stem the tide. Hate crimes rose, and between 2010 and 2016 right-wing domestic terrorism skyrocketed from 6 percent to 35 percent of domestic terror attacks, according to the Center for American Progress. The most notorious racial incident during Obama’s presidency happened in June 2015, when a 21-year-old white supremacist murdered nine Black people, including pastors, at a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina’s Mother Emanuel church.
It was while the country was led by a Black president that the Black Lives Matter movement exploded—incited by the August 2014 fatal shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, by a white police officer, as well as the death a month earlier of a Black man in New York City named Eric Garner, who was put in a choke hold by a NYPD officer. There would be further outrage over subsequent incidents of police involvement in the deaths of other African Americans. (Black Lives Matter would be reinvigorated after Obama’s presidency, with protesters of all races taking to the streets in the spring and summer of 2020 following the George Floyd killing.)
The United States’ first Black president had been elected by an overwhelming margin, with the support of the largest congressional majority in years. And yet during his second term in particular, the country was roiled by racial unrest. How was it possible that these two realities existed at once? Many, including Obama, would wonder about this seeming contradiction.
“It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic,” Obama wrote in A Promised Land, “a sense that the natural order had been disrupted.” His presidency, not to mention his progressive policies, threatened the traditional power structure in the U.S., which had long been headed by white men. Furthermore, Obama sought to make America less bullying and bellicose. Kinder, more egalitarian.
He paid a price for such lofty ambitions. From the start of his first term, Republican congressional leadership created a wall of “all-out obstruction”—as Obama labeled it in A Promised Land—“a refusal to work with me or members of my administration, regardless of the circumstances, the issue, or the consequences for the country.” Politico’s Michael Grunwald wrote in late 2016, “This [GOP] strategy of . . . treating him not just as a president from the opposing party but an extreme threat to the American way of life, has been a remarkable political success.” Grunwald quoted Republican operative Ed Rogers as saying, “A lot of us woke up every morning thinking about how to kick Obama, who could say the harshest thing about Obama on the air.” Obama himself had to admit, in A Promised Land, that the Republicans’ battle plan was deployed “with impressive discipline” the entirety of his time in office.
His opponents could not, however, negate the profound impact Obama had emotionally and psychically on many people in this country. Who can forget the charming image of him in the Oval Office bending down so a 5-year-old Black boy could touch his head, amazed that they had the same kind of hair? Wasn’t there something cool about a guy who blasted Jay-Z and Eminem in his headphones before a campaign debate? How could we not be moved by a commander-in-chief whose sorrow was so deep following the Charleston church massacre that, having no words left to give at a victim’s funeral, he broke into a heartfelt a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace”?
Obama recognized—was even motivated by—his own symbolic power. As he recounted in A Promised Land, one day in December 2006, not long before announcing his candidacy for president, Obama sat across from his wife, Michelle, at a table as a handful of campaign strategists went back and forth on staffing and logistics. The discussion had dragged on for an hour when Michelle (who made no secret of her distaste for Washington electoral politicking) posed a question: “Why you, Barack? Why do you need to be president?”
The future president thought long and hard before answering. He thought about how much he loved his wife, about how they had met. He thought about what he was about to do. Then finally he answered.
“Here’s one thing I know for sure. . . .I know that the day I raise my right hand and take the oath to be president of the United States, the world will start looking at America differently.” And that “kids all around this country—Black kids, Hispanic kids, kids who don’t fit in—they’ll . . . see their horizons lifted, their possibilities expanded.”
“And that alone,” he added, “would be worth it.”
Here are a selection of photos from Barack Obama: His Life, His Work, His Living Legacy, available at newsstands and on Amazon.
Cover image by Pari Dukovic/Trunk Archive
In 2004 Barack Obama, his wife Michelle and their daughters Sasha (left) and Malia (right) were in Chicago awaiting election returns in his successful bid for the U.S. Senate against Republican Alan Keyes.
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
In 2007 Barack Obama, then a candidate for president, walked the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Ala., in commemoration with a group that included fellow candidate Hillary Clinton, her husband and former President Bill Clinton, and U.S. congressman John Lewis, who was part of the 1965 voting rights march that ended in a clash with police on the bridge during what became known as Bloody Sunday.
Scott Olson/Getty
The Obamas enjoyed cheers from supporters at Grant Park in Chicago after he was elected President of the United States, November 4, 2008.
Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post/Getty
President Obama bent over so that the son of a staff member could touch his hair, May 8, 2009.
Pete Souza/The White House/Getty
Barack Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, applauded as the House of Representatives passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
Pete Souza/The White House/Getty
President Obama was briefed by John Brennan on the Sandy Hook school shooting on December 14, 2012.
Pete Souza/The White House/Getty
President Obama sang “Amazing Grace” during his eulogy for South Carolina state senator and Rev. Clementa Pinckney on June 26, 2015 in Charleston; Pinckney was one of nine African-Americans killed during a mass shooting at the church in which he was a pastor.
Joe Raedle/Getty
Obama took kite-surfing lessons on a vacation in the British Virgin Islands in 2017.
Jack Brockway/Getty
Barack Obama, Graca Machel (left), widow of former South African president Nelson Mandela, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa (right) danced as South African singer Thandiswa Mazwai (second from right) performed during the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at the Wanderers cricket stadium in Johannesburg on July 17, 2018.
Marco Longari/AFP/Getty
Barack and Michelle Obama arrived at the U.S. Capitol for the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States, January 20, 2021.
Julie Newmar gained her most enduring fame by playing Catwoman on the Batman television show of the 1960s, but she had been a presence on the stage and screen long before she ever donned the catsuit.
Newmar frequently played a role that was a staple in a certain kind of comedy: the attractive woman who leave men discombobulated simply by walking to a room. She was acting in such roles all three times she found herself in front of LIFE cameras.
In 1958, LIFE’s Ralph Morse took his turn shooting Newmar, this time for a role that would win her a Tony for Best Featured Actress. The show was a comedy called The Marriage-Go-Round, and Newmar played Katrin Sveg, a woman who comes from Sweden to stay with an older university couple—she’s the daughter of a colleague and suddenly grown up. Newmar’s character throws her hosts’ lives life into chaos by walking around wearing only a towel and asking the husband, a professor, to sire her a child, so the offspring will be the ultimate combination of beauty and brains. (Once again, Newmar reprised the role for the film version.)
In 1961 Newmar took on the role of one of the classic seductresses of the stage, Lola in “Damn Yankees.” As part of a broader, inventive photo shoot that was supposed to be a summer theater preview, LIFE photographer Nina Leen had Newman vamping around outdoors in front of scarecrow, and even trying out some baseball poses.
Suffice to say that Newmar had plenty of practice playing the sex kitten before she ever trained her abilities on Batman and had the Caped Crusader fumbling and bumbling like so many other men who shared a scene with her.
Julie Newmar (center) played Stupefyin’ Jones in the Broadway musical L’il Abner, 1956.
Julie Newmar starred in the Broadway play “The Marriage-Go-Round” in 1958; her character Katrin Sveg, was a provocative visitor from Sweden who at times wore only a towel.
Julie Newmar starred in the Broadway play “The Marriage-Go-Round” in 1958; her character Katrin Sveg, was a provocative visitor from Sweden who at times wore only a towel.
Julie Newmar, right, and Charles Boyer in a scene from “The Marriage-Go-Round,” in which her character has given Boyer’s a nude statue that she posed for.
If you should ever happen to get caught in slow traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, console yourself with the knowledge that it used to be worse. Much, much worse. Crossing the Garden State was a true commuter quagmire in the days before the Turnpike was built.
That’s why LIFE hailed the opening of the Turnpike, one of the first roads of its kind in America, as a major event in its January 18, 1952 issue with a story titled “Newly Opened Superroad Unravels Chronic Traffic Jam.”
“A road like this is something motorists caught in the nightmare of New Jersey traffic have long dreamed of,” exclaimed LIFE.
The new roadway offered drivers an express route from the Delaware Memorial Bridge up toward the Lincoln Tunnel (and has since been extended north). Before the opening of the Turnpike, LIFE wrote, motorists traversing the state “had to fight their cars bumper to bumper along the Pulaski Skyway, curse their way through honking traffic in Elizabeth, spin around endless traffic circles and spend up five hours on the trip.”
With the turnpike the 118-mile journey could now be done “in two hours flat,” LIFE declared. (And that was before the invention of E-Z Pass.) Through various extensions built since its opening, the length of the turnpike is now 148 miles.The road is heavily used not just because of New Jersey’s attractions but because it serves as a major connector to points along the East Coast. In 1952 LIFE projected that “more that eight million cars a year” might use the turnpike, but now the road is used by well north of 200 milllion toll-paying vehicles per year. From the songs of Bruce Springsteen to the opening credits of The Sopranos, the thoroughfare has gained cultural currency as a roadway that is much-traveled, if not always beloved.
LIFE’s photos, taken by Bernard Hoffman and Andreas Feininger, chronicled this major construction project. The task was completed in only 23 months: a feat that becomes more impressive when you consider the logistical elements involved. As LIFE wrote in 1952:
In cities whole blocks of houses had to be torn down, families relocated, street crossing overpassed. Out in the country farmland had to be bought for the 300-foot right of way, 196 highways and railroads had to be crossed. To take care of real estate obstacles required 3,500 separate real estate deals and $17.5 million [about $172 million in 2021 dollars]. Out in the marshlands near Secaucus, engineers found six miles of the land a floating mire sometimes 100 feet deep. In this they sank large pipes packed with sand. They covered the right of way with heavy dirt, then removed the pipes, leaving vertical columns of sand to act as drains until the weight of the dirt squeezed the water from the mire. Then they removed the surplus dirt and built the highway on top.
Five years later the opening of the Garden State Parkway created a second express route across New Jersey. While you can say that the construction of the Parkway and the Turnpike was completed by certain dates, the expansion and maintenance of these roads is on ongoing project, one that this never really done, as builders race to keep pace with the needs of a nation on the move.
Workers built an overpass for the brand new New Jersey Turnpike, 1951.
The rules for putting together this photo collection were simple: choose one, and only one, classic LIFE photo per state.
The one-photo limit created tough choices, because states are diverse places. Candidates for Massachusetts, for example, included a Cape Cod family vacation, an MIT classroom, and a touch football game at the Kennedy compound, among other possibilities. The photo that was finally chosen was an Alfred Eisenstaedt picture of Cape Cod fishermen, but you could argue that any of the above choices would be equally representative.
And the same is true for so many other states. Questions recurred: Do you emphasize city life or country life? The historic or the everyday? Do you favor the landscape or the people living in it?
As a whole these picture attempt, collectively, to do it all. The hope is that, when scrolling through all 51 photos at once (Washington D.C. is included), the viewer feels the sweep of the country’s variety and abundance. We have skiers in Vermont, juke joint patrons in South Carolina, commuters in Connecticut and showgirls in Nevada. While ties often went to the pictures featuring people outside and enjoying their environment, is there anything more wonderfully New Hampshire than the skepticism of a man listening to a primary speech with a weariness that captures what residents of the Granite state must endure every four years?
This exercise could be done a hundred times over, always producing different results—for California, maybe show the Academy Awards or the beach instead of the Golden Gate Bridge. Or for Pennsylvania, choose a photo from either Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, rather than couple cavorting a heart-shaped tub at a Poconos resort.
But that couple is having fun, and so are we. Please enjoy.
Children searched for creatures in tidal pool during ebb tide along the coast of Maine, 1943.
A few years back, a rumor took hold in Hollywood that a successor might soon be named to take up the mantle of Indiana Jones. After all, Harrison Ford—who transformed the swashbuckling archaeologist into a cinematic icon in 1981’s Oscar-winning blockbuster Raiders of the Lost Ark— wasn’t getting any younger, and the character still had plenty of life left in him. Ford had played the role in three sequels—Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)— and Indy had proven so popular he’d appeared in a host of comic books, video games, and other media as well.
The odds-on favorite to pick up Jones’s signature bullwhip was Guardians of the Galaxy star Chris Pratt, who had a facility for both action and comedy and had proven himself as a box office draw. The problem? Ford wasn’t so keen on the idea of stepping aside for another actor.
“Nobody else is going to be Indiana Jones—don’t you get it? I’m Indiana Jones,” a delightfully irascible Ford, then 76, said on NBC’s Today in 2019. “When I’m gone, he’s gone. It’s easy.”
Given his strong feelings on the issue, it’s perhaps not so surprising that Ford already has pledged to star in a fifth movie as the globe-trotting, treasure-hunting professor; the as-yet- untitled adventure, which sees director James Mangold (Walk the Line, Ford v Ferrari) take over the franchise from Steven Spielberg, is set for release in 2022. Without the effortless charisma Ford brings to the role, one could argue there wouldn’t be a fifth film heading into production. It’s simply hard to imagine the character would have enjoyed the same staying power in the wider cultural consciousness without Ford in the battered brown fedora.
“Harrison Ford just has this unique screen presence,” says James Kendrick, professor of film and digital media at Baylor University and the author of 2014’s Darkness in the Bliss-Out: A Reconsideration of the Films of Steven Spielberg. “He’s one of the few actors who can be simultaneously larger than life and entirely down to earth at the same time. He has great humor. He has great timing. He has just the right kind of look. Obviously, he’s a very handsome guy, but he’s a little bit unconventional in his handsomeness, and he’s always willing to be self-deprecating. To me, that’s always been one of the really important elements of Indiana Jones. It makes him relatable. It makes him so enjoyable to watch, that he is so self-deprecating and is willing to be the brunt of jokes.”
Ford himself has noted that Indy’s fallibility is key to his charm: “One of the pleasures is that we allow him to get in too deep,” the actor told Entertainment Weekly in 2008. “He’s in over his head and has to pull himself out. A character without fear or with no sense of his own inadequacy would be a pain in the ass to be around.”
THERE’S NO question that Indiana Jones remains one of the best-loved creations ever brought to the screen: The American Film Institute ranked the character as the second greatest movie hero of all time—only Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird tops him. Indy also notably placed ahead of superspy James Bond, Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in Casablanca, and Ford’s own Star Wars rogue, Han Solo—all three of whom in ways large and small influenced who Dr. Jones would become.
Spielberg, who stepped behind the camera on Raiders after enjoying enormous success with Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, had always harbored fantasies of directing a Bond movie, yet was turned down for consideration. When his close friend and Star Wars mastermind George Lucas pitched him the idea of the 1930s adventurer who travels the globe hunting rare antiquities, Spielberg found an opportunity to channel all his Bond ambitions. The filmmaker made a point to place Indy in impossible scrapes that he escaped through some combination of resourcefulness and dumb luck. Indeed, what he lacks in high-tech gadgetry he more than makes up for in good old-fashioned ingenuity. Raiders screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan once stated that his favorite line in the script was Indy’s response to his compatriot Sallah after he asks the archaeologist how he intends to retrieve the coveted biblical Ark of the Covenant, which has fallen into the hands of the Nazis. “I don’t know,” Jones says. “I’m making this up as I go.”
Both Spielberg and Kasdan have likened Ford’s appeal to that of classic leading men—actors including Steve McQueen, Peck, and of course Bogart—who naturally embodied a certain kind of rugged, rough-at-the-edges masculinity. They looked as if they had experienced life, and it hadn’t always been kind to them. Yet that worldliness made them all the more appealing.
Ford brought precisely that sort of magnetic energy to the screen as Han Solo, a character who arguably looms just as large in the actor’s filmography as the illustrious Dr. Jones. In fact, Lucas was reluctant to cast Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark, fearing that audiences could potentially have trouble seeing him as anyone other than the charming space scoundrel. He needn’t have worried. The moment Indy appears on screen for the first time, dressed in a brown leather jacket and his signature fedora, he’s clearly the perfect marriage of character and star. “Harrison Ford has a kind of core disreputability that makes him perfect for Indiana Jones,” says Time magazine film critic Stephanie Zacharek. “The guy is pretty much a grave robber, and definitely a love-’em-and-leave-’em type . . . He’s at home anywhere in the world, but there’s also an air of entitlement about him—‘Hey, I’ve come here looking for this golden thingamajig’—as if he pretty much has a right to anything he wants, just for adventure’s sake. There’s something regally masculine about Ford that makes you buy him in this role.”
Throughout Raiders of the Lost Ark (retitled Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1999), Ford beautifully captures all the adventurer’s imperfections. Yes, he’s daring and quick-witted, but his plans don’t always work out. “What people tend to forget [is that] he loses at the end of Raiders,” Kendrick notes. “He’s supposed to get the ark, and it gets taken away from him by these seedy government bureaucrats who then hide it away because they’re afraid to deal with it. The last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark is Indiana Jones walking away in semi-defeat after this boardroom meeting with some mid-level intelligence agents. For him to pull that off and still be heroic in a way, that’s a real balancing act.”
AS THEY RETURNED to the character in sequels, both Spielberg and Ford sought to preserve all he qualities that made Jones such a touchstone for generations of moviegoers. “Indiana Jones was never a machine,” Spielberg told Vanity Fair in 2008. “His imperfections, I think, make the audience feel that, with a little more exercise and a little more courage, they could be just like him. So he’s not the Terminator. He’s not so far away from the people who go to see the movies that he’s inaccessible to their own dreams and aspirations.”
That same year, a 65-year-old Ford starred in the character’s most recent big-screen outing, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a sci-fi-inflected tale involving inter-dimensional beings. “He’s older in that one, and he still looks good, but he’s definitely owning the wear and tear, the creases on his face—it’s like a tiki mug,” says Zacharek. “Admittedly, it’s easier for guys to get away with looking weathered than it is for women, but Hollywood is kind to no one in the age game. I admire his bravura.”
In recent years, Ford has made the intriguing choice to revisit some of his best-loved roles, resurrecting Han Solo for 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens (and again for a brief cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) and reprising his replicant-hunting detective Rick Deckard for the 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049. In some ways, it feels as though he’s giving the characters closure. So, a fifth Indiana Jones with Ford donning the costume one last time? It makes sense.
And there’s no one who knows that character better than Ford. Not now. Not ever. He’s Indiana Jones.
Cover image by Lucasfilm/Paramount Pictures/Masheter Movie Archive/Alamy
On the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Harrison Ford, cinematographer Douglas Slocombe (center),and director Steven Spielberg (right) work on the film’s opening action sequence.
Director Steven Spielberg on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Photo by Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Shutterstock
The first Raiders sequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, came out in 1984 and began the practice of working Indy’s name into the title. Along with Harrison Ford (background) the movie featured (left to right) Jonathan Ke Quan and Kate Capshaw.
In Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (1989), Jones nears completion of his latest quest.
Photo by Lucasfilm Ltd/Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock
After a lengthy layoff, Ford (here with Shia Lebeouf and Karen Allen) returned to his signature character in Indiana Jones and The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008).
Photo by Lucasfilm/Paramount Pictures/Kobal/Shutterstock
Karen Allen reprised her role of Marion Ravenwood for director Steven Spielberg in Indiana Jones and The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008).
Photo by Lucasfilm/Paramount Pictures/Kobal/Shutterstock
Cate Blanchett played Indy nemesis Irina Spalko in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).
