Before ‘NCIS,’ Mark Harmon Starred in This 1988 Military Thriller Flop With a Former James Bond

NCIS star Mark Harmon embarked on a feature film career with the 1987 comedy film Summer School, which was a modest box-office success and served as an effective showcase for the 1980s charm and handsomeness that led Harmon to be named People’s second-ever Sexiest Man Alive in 1986. Following Summer School, he starred alongside Sean Connery in the 1988 crime film The Presidio, in which he plays a former military cop turned San Francisco police detective who investigates a murder committed at the titular Army base.

However, despite the incomparable presence of Connery, whose role in The Presidio was immediately preceded by Connery’s Academy Award-winning performance in the 1987 crime film The Untouchables, The Presidio was a commercial and critical failure, which dealt a severe blow to Harmon’s feature-film aspirations. Indeed, while The Presidio became a virtually forgotten footnote in Connery’s legendary career, the failure of The Presidio heralded Harmon’s imminent return to television, where he subsequently toiled for more than a decade until his historic run on the military police procedural television series NCIS in 2003, the year Connery retired from acting.