Harrison Ford's '70s Western With Gene Wilder Is A Hilarious Team-Up You Have To Watch

While this fact has been retroactively forgotten, Harrison Ford actually stayed quite busy between his first two outings as Han Solo in the original "Star Wars" trilogy. In just 1979 alone, the year before "The Empire Strikes Back" was released, Ford was in four movies — one of which teamed him with one of Hollywood's favorite comedic actors of the era. That actor was Gene Wilder, and the movie was "The Frisco Kid," a comedy Western where the two actors play the mismatched duo of a bank robber (Ford) and a rabbi (Wilder).

Directed by legendary filmmaker Robert Aldrich — best known for directing "The Dirty Dozen," "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?", and the original "The Longest Yard" — "The Frisco Kid" got a tepid response from critics at the time. But as people have found their way to it over the years, they're generally pleasantly surprised at how fun the movie is. Sure, it falls on the lower half of the rankings of both Harrison Ford movies and Gene Wilder movies, and it's certainly no "Blazing Saddles." But that doesn't mean "The Frisco Kid" isn't worth a lazy Saturday afternoon watch. Especially if you're a fan of either of the leads, or comedy Westerns in general.

When people think of Harrison Ford's early career as an actor, they tend to go straight to "Star Wars," "Indiana Jones," "Blade Runner," and maybe "American Graffiti." But he'd actually been kicking around Hollywood since the mid 1960s, and a somewhat surprising genre dominated much of that early work. Even before starring in "The Frisco Kid," Ford already had multiple credits under his belt in Westerns on both the big and small screens.

In fact, Ford's first official screen credit was in a 1967 Western film called "A Time for Killing." Also that same year, he made his television debut in two episodes of the Western series "The Virginian." Between those and "The Frisco Kid," Ford would star in the movie "Journey to Shiloh" as well as appear in both the show "The Intruders" and the legendary Western series "Gunsmoke." We'll gloss over how he was in the dreadful "Cowboys & Aliens" — which 40% of fans agree is Ford's worst movie — and focus on the fact that he made his triumphant return to the Western genre when he starred in the "Yellowstone" prequel series "1923" in 2002.