The Fugitive, 1963

Like most members of my generation, my expectations for The Fugitive 1963 were influenced by a strong familiarity with the 1993 Hollywood thriller, as well as a comprehensive ignorance of anything filmed before 1970. So my first viewing of the original television series was unfortunately doomed to be a comparative process. Oh, I see, that guy is Harrison Ford. And that guy…Tommy Lee Jones, I guess. Who’s that? Oh… Wait. When is the waterfall thing gonna happen? This clash between my memories of the film and the series playing before me now didn’t last long, because the 1963 series really didn’t resemble the 1993 blockbuster at all. The longer I watched David Janssen mill about the Arizona bar, or pace around in his apartment, the more I realized I didn’t actually know a damn thing about the film I grew up with. What I did remember about it were only brief flashes of the big blockbuster spectacles. The actual plot of the film served as only a thin layer of connective tissue between train wrecks, gunshots, and the 300 foot plunge, so even that wore away easily with time.
After this rather abrupt erosion of my Hollywood vantage point, I realized the unique aspect that was coming through in the long quiet shots, and simple dialogues that made up the original show. The television series was not about a wrongly accused man who will stop at nothing to prove his innocence—it really isn’t about anything that can be easily summed up in a cinematic tagline. The series is really about presenting the sensibility of dislocation—a dislocation from the life in which the character felt he belonged. The ‘derailing’ in The Fugitive is given a much more profound context than a mega-budget crash sequence—that being the derailment of a man’s path in the world he has chosen to know, the derailment of his identity and ambitions. Where the 1993 film progressed along a well-determined plotline, the television series seemed to drift from place to place, without constantly reiterating Kimble’s long-term goal. He does bring up the one-armed man, but his actions do not constantly move along this trajectory of finding him and proving his own innocence. He instead finds himself being perpetually derailed, as he encounters unseen situations and becomes connected to new people and places. The 1963 Kimble accepts the cards he is dealt and sometimes must allow the restoration of his previous existence to be postponed.
It is this postponement that embodies the profound struggle that people faced everyday in 1960s America, and still face even today. The idea of the ‘American Dream’ still motivates people to work hard toward the goals they set for themselves, but rarely does this dream become reality, and more rarely does it happen according to any plan. People must reckon with the life they hoped for, and live alongside what could have been in the shadowy gutter of reality. But as Dr. Kimble always does, those of us in the gutter keep one eye on the road above.