Actors - The Fugitive

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	Actors - The Fugitive

The Fugitive is a 1993 Academy Award and Golden Globe Award winning feature film, based on the television series The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble, and Tommy Lee Jones as Deputy United States Marshal Samuel Gerard. Jones won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance. It also featured Andreas Katsulas as the one-armed man, Sela Ward as Kimble's wife, Jeroen Krabbé, Julianne Moore, and Joe Pantoliano. The film was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, one of the only films to be associated with a television series to be so honored.

Plot

Kimble is a successful Chicago surgeon who returns home from a party one evening to find his wife dying and a mysterious one-armed man escaping. Despite his attempts to save her and his testimony about the one-armed man, Kimble is convicted of first-degree murder, due to evidence such as a misunderstood 9-1-1 call and no signs of forced entry by the one-armed man. Kimble is sentenced to death by lethal injection.

While being transported to prison, Kimble escapes after a revolt by other prisoners causes the bus to crash onto a train line (that also causes the train to derail.) As a fugitive from justice, he becomes the quarry of the obsessed Sam Gerard and his team of United States Marshals.

There are many close calls with Richard almost getting captured. They are often brought about by Kimble's inability to stop helping those in need. The first is at a hospital where Kimble shaves off his beard, changes clothes into a doctor's uniform and walks past a police officer who is looking for him. Kimble tries to escape by stealing an ambulance but is forced to a halt by a police road block in a tunnel. He exits the ambulance and is pursued by Gerard through the tunnel's drainage system. Kimble escapes his pursuers by leaping a great height down the spillway of a dam into the river below.

Kimble returns to Chicago to search for the one-armed man who killed his wife. He rents an apartment and there he makes fake ID cards to use to get in to the local Cook County Hospital, where he searches the computers in the prosthetic limb area for phone numbers of those who match the description of the one-armed man. Unfortunately the people he has chosen to stay with include a drug dealer and as the police arrive to arrest the dealer, Kimble has another close call. The drug dealer later informs police Kimble had been living with them. While police arrive at the apartment, Kimble is confronted at the hospital by a female doctor who had seen him change a young patient's medical orders so that he could have a life-saving operation, but Kimble manages to escape.

Going through the list of men with prosthetic limbs, Kimble discovers that one is in jail for armed robbery. He visits this man but sees that it is not his wife's murderer. Trying to understand Kimble's movements, Gerard also found that same man on a list of one-armed men with criminal records. Gerard arrives shortly after Kimble giving him a close call when they pass on the stairs, but he manages to escape into a Saint Patrick's Day parade.

Kimble's innate intelligence keeps him one step ahead of Gerard who begins to have internal doubts as to Kimble's guilt, particularly when they show up at one potential criminal's apartment with clues that Kimble has been there. The final showdown occurs at a medical conference where the truth is finally revealed: Kimble was getting close to producing evidence that an experimental drug nearing FDA approval was causing serious liver damage, which if revealed would have been detrimental to the pharmaceutical company and Kimble's friend Dr. Charles Nichols. The one-armed man had been sent by Nichols to kill Kimble that night to silence him. Finally, Nichols and the one-armed man are arrested and Gerard symbolically unlocks Kimble's handcuffs before they drive away.

Parallels

There are interesting parallels seen between this story and the novel/musical Les Miserables, with Gerard's pursuit of Kimble akin to the pursuit of Valjean by Javert, with one key difference: Javert never lets go of his obsession to follow the letter of the law and hunt down his fugitive, even killing himself when he cannot reconcile the justice Valjean dishes out. Gerard, on the other hand, is portrayed externally as a man like Javert, willing to even risk his own loyal followers to catch his man, but internally is far more of a thinking man who can balance justice and duty.

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Actors - The Fugitive

Plot

Parallels

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