Released in 1980, director Richard Rush's The Stunt Man is a vibrant example of seventies' counter-culture film-making at its best. There's plenty of casual sex, nudity, and grind-house style violence. The picture has a loose, "anything goes" atmosphere. At the same time, there are pot-head profundities on display: the movie is about the ubiquity of betrayal in Hollywood, about the effects of the Vietnam war, and, even, a meditation on the nature of reality: since the picture is the backstage chronicle of an ambitious director shooting a World War One epic, we are invited to deliberate on what is real and what is fictional. The director is played by Peter O'Toole, probably a caricature of Francis Ford Coppola on t location for Apocalypse Now. O'Toole as Eli Cross, a narcissistic director, never has his feet on the ground -- he is literally suspended on his crane, hanging in midair, generally with no obvious means of support, or zooming around in a small helicopter, the so-called "chopper" as it is called in the movie. I said the movie features pot-head profundities, a comment that is not intended to be derogatory, and the film insists, I think, that Cross is not only a flamboyant film maker but, also, "the grand inventor" of all things, God himself. (O'Toole is more convincing in this role than the deity that appears in the Bible.) The picture is a peculiar and unstable mixture of serious subject matter, high-flown eloquence, and down-and-dirty pulp fiction with gratuitous sex, tits and ass, and lots of elaborately staged explosions and chases. The director, Richard Rush, is an enigma -- he cut his teeth on low-budget exploitation films, made The Stunt Man, which was highly regarded in its time, and, then, slipped back into audience-pleasing genre pictures. Critics determined that Rush was neither 'fish nor fowl", not exactly Francis Coppola but, also, considerably superior to the exploitation films that he ended up making. Hollywood likes type-casting not only in its actors but also directors and, since no one could really assimilate The Stunt Man (famously praised by Pauline Kael as one of the best pictures of the year) Rush wasn't given the right material for his talent and ended-up slipping out of view.
The Stunt Man was one of two novels written by the New Yorker investigative reporter Paul Brodeur. It was published in 1970 before Brodeur became well-known for his crusading journalism -- he was one of the investigators that exposed the carcinogenic effects of asbestos and was, generally a specialist in pollution and toxic tort exposes. My suspicion is that the unique qualities of The Stunt Man derive from what were probably literate and, even, high-toned aspects of the source novel. The picture involves a Vietnam war veteran on the run from the cops and probably suffering from what we would call today "PTSD." The veteran stumbles onto a film set involving a classic car crashing off an old bridge into a river. The car is driven eccentrically and the vet believes that it is trying to run him down. He interferes with the car and, then, sees it plunge off the bridge and into the river. (Although the car crash is an effect in the film that Cross is making, the vet interprets it as occurring because of his efforts to avert the vehicle from running over him.) A stuntman drowns in the crash. The vet continues his escape and ends up at a beach where a battle is being filmed "with five cameras", a big spectacle involving many showy explosions, fragmentary corpses (they turn out to be men in make-up half buried in the sand) and bi-planes strafing the advancing troops. A cop is investigating the disappearance of the stuntman whom we know to have drowned in the river. He harasses the director and his crew and, under pressure, they claim the scruffy fugitive is, in fact, the missing stunt man. The cop smells a rat but he can't get to the bottom of the ruse. Cross hires the vet who is impersonating a stunt man to perform real stunts in the movie. They call the vet "Lucky." Lucky turns out to have genuine gift for "hell for leather" stunts involving significant danger. He has sex with a make-up girl and, then, is seduced by the film's leading lady played by an angelic-looking Barbara Hershey. After some amusing chases filmed in Keystone Kop manner by Cross -- Lucky evades an army of inept German troops wearing comical Pickelhaube (that is, Prussian helmets with spear-point tops) by clambering all over the complicated gables and eaves of the Coronado Hotel (a landmark on the beach in San Diego). Some of the stunts seem lethal and are increasingly dangerous and Lucky comes to believe that Cross is trying to engineer his death -- probably to conceal the actual death of the stunt man in the river. In the course of his love affair with the film's leading lady, Lucky learns that the character is also sleeping with Eli Cross. This leads to some quarrels. Hershey is puzzled by Lucky's naivety -- she says that actresses having sex with directors is just the way the industry works. Lucky and the actress get drunk and have a slapstick love scene involving a set that they partially destroy and about forty gallons of paint. (There's a fantastic purely seventies' line in this scene -- Barbara Hershey who is half-naked and covered in paint, cries out: "We gotta get organized!") Lucky acts out the offense for which the cops are chasing him -- he beat up his wife's boyfriend (she was unfaithful when he was in 'Nam) in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop -- and persuades Hershey that he is fundamentally harmless. (As a Vietnam vet everyone has suspected him of rape, murder, and various war crimes.) Cross persuades Lucky to perform the stunt that killed the other stunt man. He and the leading lady plot to flee the film set and avoid the potentially deadly stunt in the river. This sets up the climax of the movie.
Pauline Kael commended the movie as "kinetic" and film's mise-en-scene is, indeed, a triumph of controlled, vivid chaos. In the opening scene, a buzzard snatches an apple as two line-men look on and, then, are confronted by the fleeing vet. The sequence involving the first river stunt features a picture perfect stream running in a narrow gorge -- there's a tree off-balance and about to topple into the water, a memorably strange image. Much of the film is staged like a silent comedy, in particular, the scene in which the vet clambers all over the facade of the Coronado Hotel as dozens, if not hundreds, of German soldiers pursue him firing guns and dodging bullets blasted down on the crumbling structure by a pesky bi-plane -- this is a triumph of action film-making both comical and scary and it's as good as anything Steven Spielberg has done. Even dialogue sequences jerk and spastically dance around -- huge waves batter a sea-wall splashing thirty feet in the sky in one scene. The camera placement is exemplary and the editing is sharp as a razor. Pennants whip in boil in the wind. Surf pounds the beach and, overhead, the helicopter banks and turns and spirals. Peter O'Toole's Eli Cross seems sometimes to underplay and act down to earth, but, most of the time, his British diction is perfect and rotund and he declaims his speeches as if they were Shakespeare. O'Toole's dramatic delivery if offset by the grungy appeal of Steve Railsbeck who plays Lucky -- the contrast between the two acting styles is one the pleasures offered by this movie. Expensively made and brilliantly acted, The Stunt Man is as fun as a cult movie, but better, I think.
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