The Stunt Man

It wasn't released.  It escaped.

Peter O'Toole spoke those words, referring to his 1980 movie THE STUNT MAN.  A film that took many years from conception to release.  One that 20th Century Fox shelved for a year before its "escape". Certainly, the film defies categorization.  Very hard to pin down the genre.  How to market such an offbeat picture? Thriller? Comedy? Action? All of the above are accurate, but don't mesh in the way that say, ROMANCING THE STONE would.  THE STUNT MAN unsurprisingly did not rake it in at the box office.

The critics liked it.  Even Pauline Kael deemed it one of the best pictures of its year.  THE STUNT MAN has many admirers, and I would count myself among them, but I have several problems with co-writer/director Richard Rush's film.  The tone, for one.  Despite a screenplay filled with potentially dark themes, the tone is very light hearted.  Too much so.  Even whimsical and silly at moments.  If Rush was attempting for some sort of knowing incongruity to make his (and original author Paul Brodeur's) points more effective, he's only successful in spurts. Adding to this is Dominic Frontiere's jokey score - loud, vibrant, sounding like old timey nickelodeon/silent movie music.  There had to be a point to this? For me, it undermined the film at every turn.

THE STUNT MAN begins with a scraggly guy running from the police.  Actually, it begins with a dog licking his testicles as it sits in the road but, hey...Cameron (Steve Railsback) is a Vietnam vet who soon after eluding the fuzz is nearly run down by a motorist on a bridge.  A few scenes later, he's looking down on a beach, watching planes fire artillery at soldiers on the dunes.  Yep, it's a movie set.  The director is Eli Cross, (O'Toole) who informs Cameron that the bridge was also a set, and that the motorist was a stunt man who plunged his vehicle into the river and died.  Is Cameron to blame? No matter; Cross offers to cover for the young man when the police arrive if he'll assume the dead stunt man's identity.

Cameron finds himself with no other option, but regrets his decision soon afterward.  Cross is directing an elaborate WWI drama filled with dangerous set pieces.  Makeup renders Cameron a look-alike for the dead stunt guy and the film's leading actor.  The film's leading actress is the beguiling Nina (the beguiling Barbara Hershey) and soon Cameron is in love.  Enough to fly into a jealous rage when he learns Nina slept with the director once upon a time; "Don't you know that's how little girls get into the movies?"

Cross is a mercurial, manipulative, flamboyant auteur who charms and berates his crew in equal measure. Will do whatever to get a scene, an emotion.   Of Cameron he summarizes: "It's not what he's eating, but what's eating him that makes it sort of interesting."  Cameron soon believes that his director in fact wants to kill him, subjecting him to increasingly dangerous set-ups, including a rooftop chase then soon turns into something ultra elaborate, and later a recreation of that bridge stunt.  When he asks an extra if his rifle is loaded with blanks, the response is "That's not what is says on the box."  Is Cameron delusional? Paranoid?  Suffering post traumatic stress disorder? He will share some memories of his time in the jungle, but no one is impressed. "Ancient history" states the stunt coordinator.

THE STUNT MAN does a creditable, sometimes remarkable job of toying with the ideas of reality.  Rush has great fun with verisimilitude in his movie.  And what better canvas than a movie set? The film is admirably multi-layered.  It doesn't take long to recognize the theological theme of an Everyman who feels at the whims of an angry god.  Or the plight of veterans.  Even one of the most absurd scenes - Cameron destroys a warehouse filled with props and falls under several cans of different colors of paint as he explains what greeted him back in the U.S.A. after his tour in 'Nam - brings the point across.  But overall the film is a muddle.  Smoke and mirrors about an industry of smoke and mirrors but also about the confusion of those who are not part of that world.

O'Toole is fabulous.  No argument there.  His Eli Cross was reportedly based on David Lean, who O'Toole worked with on LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.  I adored the scene as Cross remains on a crane, swooping down to follow Cameron as he walks down a path.  Perfect imagery.   Allen Goorwitz is also excellent as the film's screenwriter.  The conversations between him and Cross may get to at least part of the crux of this story.  One great line - "Eli, do you know that when I read the insane asylum scene to my family, do you know that my oldest son shook my hand for the first time in his whole life? So why is it, Eli, why is it that your vulgar little scene turns out to be so much more moving? So much more impassioned?"

Railsback does interesting work himself, trying to navigate perhaps the most enigmatic character, which of course makes this hero confused about the enigmatic behavior of everyone else so delicious.  Is he cunning? A dolt? We're never quite sure.  Or about THE STUNT MAN itself.