What you want from a thriller, besides thrills, is a little originality, a MacGuffin, as Hitchcock called it, to beguile you with its trick logic. You get that - and more - in Witness. The original screenplay by Earl W. Wallace and William Kelley brings together the scuzzy, violent, urban world of narcotics, murder and crooked cops and the pastoral, time-warp world of the Amish, those pious, black clad Pennsylvania farmers who live today much as they did in the 17th century. While on a trip with his widowed mother, Rachel (Kelly McGillis), Samuel Lapp, a little Amish boy (Lukas Haas), witnesses a brutal murder in the men's room of a Philadelphia railway station. John Book (Harrison Ford), the detective assigned to the case, discovers that the killers are corrupt cops. When they put a bullet into him, Book escapes to Amish country. Peace. Beauty. John loves Rachel. Vice versa. Consternation among the Amish. Anxiety among the crooked cops, who finally track John down in his idyllic hideout. Climactic, cross-cultural crunch.

Not every director could make this unlikely situation work. But Australia's Peter Weir, making his first American-based film, does an admirable job. In his Australian movies like "Picnic at Hanging Rock" and "The Last Wave" he's dealt with mystery, murder and the clash of incongruous cultures. The aborigines in "The Last Wave" are like the Amish in "Witness" - both groups, isolated in the modern world, have retained an almost mystic spiritual intergity. But Weir has lost much of his portentousness while losing none of his extraordinary artistry. "Witness" is a feast of ravishing images and suspenseful rhythms: at a communal barn raising, the half-built barn swarms with men like bees making honey; at the police station, when Samuel identifies a photograph of the killer for John Book, Weir goes into sudden slow motion, creating an electric intimacy between the innocent boy and the hardened cop.

As he showed in "The Year of Living Dangerously," in which he cast actress Linda Hunt as the male half-caste Billy Kwan, Weir has a wonderful eye for the unexpected. Here Alexander Godunov, the Russian ballet dancer who defected to the United States, is immensely engaging as a young Amish farmer who has his eye on Rachel. Weir is superb with actors: Lukas Haas is angelic but real as Samuel; Josef Sommer seems to sweat evil as Book's crooked chief; you can't believe that Danny Glover, the saintly share cropper of "Places in the Heart," is the vicious murderer in this movie; Harrison Ford is tough, sweet, romantic, brooding, masculine - more like the easy-flowing old movie stars than almost anybody in his generation. And Kelly McGillis as Rachel is the most incandescent young actress to come along in a while. In her severe Amish dress she has the solidity and sensuality of a Frans Hals portrait. Turning from her bath to lock eyes with Ford, she makes one of the screen's most beautiful and moving shots of a woman - the embodiment of T.S. Eliot's line: "The awful daring of a moment's surrender."

By Jack Kroll
Newsweek