THE STUNT MAN

Magill's Survey of Cinema, 15 Jun 1995.
(c) 1995 Magill's Survey of Cinema

Abstract:
Lucky Cameron (Steve Railsback), a fugitive from the police, stumbles onto a film location, where he is hired as a stuntman by Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole), a megalomaniacal director who has inadvertently caused the death of another stuntman. Becoming increasingly paranoid as the seemingly malevolent Cross exploits him, Cameron engages in an ambiguous affair with Nina (Barbara Hershey), the leading actress, while trying to figure out Cross's true intentions. The fantasy-reality theme is explored with considerable virtuosity and sophistication.


Summary:
Richard Rush's highly acclaimed THE STUNT MAN is one of those rare, superior films like Philippe de Broca's KING OF HEARTS (LE ROI DU COEUR, 1967) that will take many years to find an audience. Arguably the outstanding film of 1980 (with few apologies to the Academy Award-winning ORDINARY PEOPLE), THE STUNT MAN was nominated for three Academy Awards, a half-dozen Golden Globe nominations in various categories, and similar honors from the Directors' and Writers' Guilds. Additionally, its star, Peter O'Toole, received a Best Actor Award from the National Society of Film Critics. In fact, film critics placed the film on as many as seventy individual "top ten" film lists across the country. Yet THE STUNT MAN, as a result of what its producers term a "mishandling" of the distribution, has been seen by very few members of the moviegoing public.

THE STUNT MAN was first announced as a 1971 release to be directed by Richard Rush, who, up to that point, had gained most of his experience in motorcycle and hippie exploitation motion pictures; however, it was not filmed until 1978. When it was finally completed in 1979, some of the potential distributors cautioned that the film was not marketable due to its subject matter, which consisted of what some people viewed as an "inside joke" concerning filmmaking and life as visualized through the eyes of a young stunt man who is trying to contend with an eccentric director. The film opened in 1980 in Seattle without a distributor but played to record crowds for forty consecutive weeks, attracting, in the process, enough critical interest to make a Los Angeles engagement feasible. In Los Angeles, where it played for six weeks, it was the period's top-grossing film. This feat attracted a major distributor, Twentieth Century-Fox, who immediately released the film in Canada and then more quietly at two theaters in New York City. These Manhattan openings were unsupported by any television advertising, and when as a result the film drew disappointing crowds, it was again relegated to less important theaters.

Finally, in another attempt to reach a somewhat wider audience, Twentieth Century-Fox released the film in other cities but, at the same time, in an effort to reduce costs, the studio tampered with much of the film's promotion, cancelling television advertisements and juggling the designs of poster and newspaper ads, with the result that the film again did not draw well, although it was nominated for three Academy Awards. At that point, the studio held up distribution, intending to release it with more ballyhoo if it won an award in at least one of the nominated categories, Best Director, Best Screenplay, or Best Actor. During the voting period, however, it played in only three theaters nationwide, and after it failed to win any Oscars, it virtually disappeared.

De Broca's LE ROI DU COEUR, known in the United States as KING OF HEARTS, had suffered a fate in 1967 which paralleled that of THE STUNT MAN; yet in succeeding years, it managed to acquire a significant following on the art film circuit, and its rapidly increasing status as a genuine cult film finally prompted a number of successful re-releases to neighborhood theaters and cable television, where it has done well. A similar destiny would seem to be inevitable for its 1980 counterpart if it is eventually to gain significant recognition.

THE STUNT MAN, unlike other films about filmmaking, is a challenging work that merges action with an interplay of ideas. It is a fluid mosaic of incessantly shifting perceptions and characterizations that threatens to leave its viewers stranded unless they are willing to play as fast and loose with the film's premises as its creators do. Throughout the film, its characters are able to perceive only a small segment of every situation's entirety, and thus, since we view the action through their eyes, the audience is able to comprehend each scene only in terms of the individual character's interpretation of it. Unfortunately, each character misinterprets the action in varying degrees relative to the extent of his own paranoid perspective. For example, each person in the film distrusts almost every other person in it. Like a puzzle, the situation is constructed to demonstrate how difficult it is particularly for the central character and for the viewer to discern the truth. Ideas collide head-on in THE STUNT MAN; and just as the viewer sorts out the intellectual traffic jam, the film races ahead, confusing him again.

On the surface, the story is about Lucky Cameron (Steve Railsback), a fugitive from the police who happens upon a film company on location. Its director, Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole), an egomaniacal, hyperactive dictator, offers him protection from the police if he will take over the job of a recently deceased stunt man who may have been a victim of the director's quest for a terrific death scene. Beneath this surface description, however, lurks a rapid-fire chain reaction of paranoid interactions that reveals the essence of the film and instigates the action up to this point.

On a typically peaceful summer day, stirred only by the frenetic music of Dominic Frontiere ricocheting on the sound track, a police car sounds its horn at a dog sleeping in the road. The dog snarls. A telephone lineman watching this occurrence throws a rock at a raven, which darts away, smashing into a helicopter carrying a cameraman and a movie director, Eli Cross. The pilot yells, "That damn bird tried to kill us!" The voice of the unseen director replies, "That's your point of view. Did ya ever think to ask the bird what he thought?" Cross takes a bite from an apple and tosses it out of the helicopter. The apple plunges down onto the roof of a cafe and rolls off of it to the top of a parked police car, giving its two officers a start. Inside the building, a truck driver attempts to touch a bending waitress' breast and is bitten by the Chihuahua that she is carrying clutched to her bodice. Nearby, a jittery, scruffy-looking young man (Steve Railsback) is playing pinball and becomes terrified when the police enter. They handcuff him, but he knocks them down, runs out the door, and sprints away while they shoot at him.

A short distance away, the fugitive encounters the telephone lineman, knocks him down, and then grabs his tools before disappearing into the woods. Near a river, he uses the tools to separate the handcuffs, and then, sighting a bridge, he bolts across it and tries to hitch a ride in a classic old Duesenberg that happens to be passing. Its driver stops, but when the young man attempts to climb in, he pushes the fugitive out with his foot and speeds away, leaving him sprawling in the dust. Then the old car turns around and aims right at him. Thinking that the driver is intent upon killing him, the escaped prisoner picks up a heavy metal bolt and throws it through the car's windshield. The car does not come near him, however, and when the young man opens his eyes, it has disappeared. In fact it has crashed through the side of the bridge and is now on the bottom of the river. Next, the escapee looks up and sees the helicopter, which comes down close while its occupant, Cross, looks him over. Terrified, the young man runs madly off the bridge and through the countryside until he comes to the ocean. He cuts off the legs of his pants so that he will resemble a vacationer and joins the crowd mingling around a resort watching a film crew staging a war scene on the beach.

The action has moved along up to this point because each character thinks that one of the others is out to get him. The helicopter pilot is afraid of the raven, the falling apple unnerves the police, and the jittery young man panics the moment the police enter, thus giving himself away. He again panics on the bridge, assuming that the driver of the Duesenberg is going to kill him for unknown reasons, so he takes defensive action again and possibly causes the driver's death. Finally, his fear of the helicopter sends him plunging madly on to the ocean resort. The words of Eli Cross now come back to haunt us, "That's your point of view." No one has, in fact, stopped to get any other character's point of view.

The audience has by now been forced to choose between two possible perceptions of what has occurred. First, since there is a helicopter hovering overhead during the action, the young man might not be a fugitive but actually an actor playing a scene shot from above. On the other hand, the fugitive might have instead intruded on a scene in progress in which the man in the Duesenberg was doing a stunt and had fully intended to drive off the bridge but could not take the time to explain because the camera was rolling. This is, indeed, exactly what happened, as the audience soon discovers. The fleeing prisoner, however, misinterpreted what he saw and thus caused the stunt man's death by drowning when his thrown bolt cracked the car's protective windshield before it plunged into the water. A paranoid reaction that failed to distinguish between reality and fantasy has now brought tragedy.

When the fugitive shows up at the beach filming, Eli Cross recognizes him from the events on the bridge. Yet the director has problems of his own and must cover for him with the police. Cross has a permit allowing him to film at the resort which he could lose if the death becomes known. Therefore, he pretends that the young man, whom he calls "Lucky" Burt Cameron, was actually the driver of the car. This satisfies the police for the moment, particularly when the other actors and crew members, who know perfectly well that Cameron is a stranger, stand behind their director and keep up the charade. Only Cameron has doubts, but once he is cleaned up, clean shaven, and has his hair dyed a sandy color, he becomes Cross's stunt man.

Cameron soon becomes caught up in his new role, and after some basic training in how to fall, he is plunged into his first stunt. The complexities of this stunt would in reality be impossible to photograph in one continuous take the way it appears in the film when Cameron does it; actually, it would require numerous setups and movements of the camera. This scene is constructed as a thematic microcosm paralleling the paranoid chain reactions of the film's opening minutes. As one event quickly sets off another, the new stunt man runs across rooftops pursued by World War I German soldiers and is shot at by airplanes. He leaps from a tower and lands on a balcony and then crashes through a skylight falling on a brothel bed between two people making love. He is finally captured by soldiers carousing in the downstairs bar who become the symbolic counterparts of the camera crew on the beach earlier in the film.

After the scene is concluded, Cameron realizes how much money there is to be made by doing stunts. He is also rather puffed up over his own success and over the fact that he thinks that Nina (Barbara Hershey), the actress who is playing the leading role, is falling in love with him. Between his stunts, he plays love scenes with her. Yet the stunt man's confidence does not last long, as the director like some malevolent god, seeks to redefine Cameron's existence on an almost daily basis and to keep him forever off balance with almost existential cross-examinations. Cameron's paranoid tendencies quickly reassert themselves, and he begins incessantly to reevaluate his own premises, thus forcing the audience, which must share his limited perspective, to do the same. Is Nina, for example, really in love with him or is she toying with him on Eli's orders? In fact, what is her actual relationship with Eli? The stunt man distrusts Cross and cannot decide if the director is actually protecting him or if he is merely another expendable bit of equipment to be employed in the director's mad quest to produce a masterpiece.

Finally, Cameron is called upon to repeat the Duesenberg stunt, and he is by now totally convinced that Eli is going to murder him in order to make a perfect realistic scene. The night before it is to take place, he tries to convince Nina to run away with him, but she wants to finish her scenes. Additionally, Eli has security police keeping anybody from leaving the hotel, ostensibly to insure that the crew will be sober and on time for the next day's shooting. Cameron ultimately convinces her to prove her love for him by hiding in the trunk of the Duesenberg. Instead of doing the stunt, he will escape with both the car and her in the morning.

Yet the next day, he cannot get away and must perform the dangerous stunt with the added worry of the passenger in his trunk. Or is she really there? He finally makes a break for it in the Duesenberg, intending to roar across the bridge and down the road, but something goes wrong and the car falls off the bridge into the water. Stunned, Cameron still manages to roll down a window and swim to safety. As his head appears above the water he sees Nina on the shore applauding him along with the rest of the film company. She had been found in the trunk the night before and was told that Cameron had changed his mind and intended to do the stunt after all. Thus, as the film ends, Cameron is giddy with success as both stunt man and lover. The final shots of the film show Cameron demanding more money from Eli and cursing the director's refusals as he departs, almost floating off in his helicopter.

The complexity of the materials that make up THE STUNT MAN could, with a lesser director, have resulted in nothing more than a static puzzle. Yet this film is a virtuoso work of filmmaking that takes its viewers on an intense, mysterious trip to an undefined destination. Beginning with the misunderstood raven and the apple rolling down the roof of the cafe, the subjects of paranoia and motion pictures are joined in a completely believable manner. O'Toole's Eli Cross, for example, is imbued with the strident, visionary drive of a director who is totally self-absorbed and will do anything to achieve what he wants. Railsback's Cameron brings his own paranoid type of madness with him. The clash of these two mad entities elicits the major suspense in the film. Cameron feels that he is trapped -- that if the police do not get him, Eli will. He is totally convinced that the director means to kill him in three days when he must reshoot the stunt of the Duesenberg going off the bridge, and the audience believes this also. The placement of the story on a movie location encourages this paranoid fantasy. It is a world that trades on illusions and different angles of vision.

Cameron is obviously totally deluded and wrong. It was Eli Cross who first states the film's premise: "That's your point of view. Did ya ever think to ask the bird what he thought?" It is actually Cross who ultimately frees Cameron from his paranoia. Yet to Cameron, the flamboyant director is a whimsical god hovering over all in the basket chair of his crane, holding in his hands the power of life and death. He is always lurking overhead, dangling from his crane or his helicopter. He is able to drop into each frame of film seemingly at will, or, when his mood changes, to swing in from the side. Cross is above the world, controlling everything and everyone. He knows what his people are doing and what they are thinking at all times.

Cameron is at the other extreme. He does not even know how to interpret the situations in which he finds himself. He does not realize that Cross has a use for him beyond covering up the fact of Burt's death. The director senses, within Cameron's desperate will to live, something of a kindred madness -- the kind that he desires for his film. The director's need, beyond a successful motion picture, is to do something mad and to be worshiped for his accomplishment. In Cameron's fugitive inability to trust anyone, the director has found the foil that his legend requires. At the end of the film, when Cross has accomplished his act of madness and burnished his own legend, the self-centered god appears benign and Cameron need fear no more.

Eli Cross as portrayed by O'Toole may be as definitive a satire of the auteur theory as has ever been done. O'Toole's Eli is Captain Ahab with a camera, a monomaniac obsessed with his legend and his film, and he will manipulate anyone to get it made. He plays out his destiny with the passionately crazed strength and sureness of vision of the totally self-centered. O'Toole gives a once-in-a-lifetime comic performnace, playing his character as a composite of a crotchety director of the John Huston type and a tough one in the style of the fierce-tempered Sam Peckinpah. He shapes the character verbally through volleys of words and lines that fly like tennis balls, alternately slamming and punching to catch an opponent offguard, or gently rolling to their intended target. He pounces flamboyantly on other characters' lines and creates ideas like a man possessed. His conversations with the screenwriter Sam (Allen Goorwitz) are comic pirouettes marked by style and timing. The fat, earthbound Sam, a practical man and a worrier, is Eli's best friend, but even as such he is an obstacle to Eli's improvised madness. The director repeatedly throws out Sam's uninspired scenes in exchange for his own ideas that never seem to touch the earth and then tries to explain his actions through unequal philosophical exchanges that resemble comedy routines in which Sam always grudgingly admits that Eli is right.

Railsback superbly counterbalances O'Toole's flamboyance with a portrait of a down-and-out, thoroughly beaten loner who is able to survive only through his inability to trust anyone. The audience perceives the film's action largely through his eyes, sharing his misapprehension and his limited perspective. With his head and his eyes to guide us we become caught up in the uncertainty and suspense of the situation, and we fear for what conceivably might happen. We are thus taken in by Eli Cross along with Cameron and everyone else. This is a testimony to Railsback's conviction and believability as an actor. We know nothing about Cameron except that he was in Vietnam for two years and that he is on the run. For all we know, he might be a killer. Yet, he persuades us to share his fears and his uncertainties through the persuasiveness of his will to live. Ultimately, through the sheer physicality of his performance, Railsback makes a deluded, paranoid, self-pitying loser with terrible judgment come across as a superb stunt man and a sympathetic figure.

The mysterious journey toward some kind of truth that comprises THE STUNT MAN winds its way through a veritable circus of exciting stunt scenes. Technically, these scenes designed by director Rush lie somewhere between raw footage and the finished product and in this way are remarkably effective in their contribution to the illusionary quality of the film. Some cases in point are the shooting scenes at the Hotel Del Coronado (the same hotel used in Billy Wilder's SOME LIKE IT HOT, 1959) near San Diego. Rush's cameras are placed for a dual purpose -- to record the scene that Eli Cross is shooting and the one that Rush is making. Consequently, during a scene in which Eli's film crew is photographing soldiers being strafed and bombed on the beach, we also see, in our version, the hotel that will not be visible in Eli's shots. Rush then juggles the perspectives back and forth using Eli's crowd of onlookers like a Greek chorus to react to the camera's alternation of fantasy and reality. First, the crowd cheers and applauds the bombing and strafing, and yet when the smoke clears, the people become hysterical, believing that live ammunition has actually been used as they view the carnage and the bloodshed. They revert again to laughter when the blood-stained corpses get up and walk away. These crowd reactions are magnificently effective because the real audience watching Rush's film also becomes momentarily confused by the bloody bodies.

This type of reality versus illusion paradox recurs throughout the film. The audience sees the camera when it hangs back recording Eli's film being made, but when it closes in on the action in long continuous takes that give the viewers the impression of constantly changing angles and of accelerating speed, we begin to get confused as to which film we are in. Cameron's chase scenes on the rooftop exemplify this confusion. When we see the hotel's structure, parking lots, and palm trees, we are secure in San Diego, but when Rush charges in close with his camera and all we see is a rooftop, Cameron, and some German soldiers running, it is World War I France in 1917. The cameras are located so strategically by Rush that they satisfy the needs of the film being shot as well as of the one being shown, and this also allows for a certain amount of interplay between the two. Behind all of this action is the driving music of Frontiere which lashes the characters on. The melody never completes itself but repeats and accelerates when the characters go into motion or when the mood of the film changes. The music is essential to the action, and we hear it long before we see some of the characters or the stunts. It actually seems to be prodding the action forward.

THE STUNT MAN is, then, a magnificent mystery that keeps its viewers off balance and constantly revises their interpretation of what they have seen. It is thus fully deserving of a chance to spin its tricks on a larger and more varied audience. If it had been made by Federico Fellini or Francois Truffaut instead of by Rush, perhaps it would have had more publicity and better distribution, but then it would not reflect the ultimate illusion that is Hollywood. Filmmaking as it is practiced in America, with its emphasis on competition and commercial success, creates the conditions necessary to drive a film crew to the point of lunacy. Movie people can understand this madness, but possibly their executives do not believe the public can share the joke, so THE STUNT MAN remains little seen.


Release Date: 1980

Production Line:
Richard Rush for Twentieth Century-Fox

Director: Richard Rush

Cinematographer: Mario Tosi

File Editor: Jack Hofstra and Caroline Ferriol

Additional Credits:
Music - Dominic Frontiere

MPAA Rating: R

Run Time: 127 minutes

Cast:
Eli Cross - Peter O'Toole
Cameron - Steve Railsback
Nina Franklin - Barbara Hershey
Sam - Allen Goorwitz
Jake - Alex Rocco
Denise - Sharon Farrell
Raymond Bailey - Adam Roarke
Ace - Philip Bruns
Chuck Barton - Chuck Bail
Gabe - John Garwood
Henry - Jim Hess
Father - George D. Wallace
Mother - Dee Carroll
Sister - Leslie Winograde

Review Sources:
New York Times: October 17, 1980, III, p. 6
Newsweek: September 1, 1980, p. 45
Time: September 1, 1980, p. 58
Variety: June 11, 1980, p. 20

Named persons in Production Credits:
Richard Rush

Studios named in Production Credits:
Twentieth Century-Fox

Screenplay (Author):
Lawrence B. Marcus
Richard Rush
Paul Brodeur

Color



Video Available.
Genre:
Drama

Award Citations:
Academy Awards - Nomination - Best Director - Richard Rush
Academy Awards - Nomination - Best Actor - Peter O'Toole
Academy Awards - Nomination - Best Screenplay (Based on Material from Another Medium) - Lawrence B. Marcus
National Society of Film Critics - Winner - Best Actor - Peter O'Toole (Screenplay), Richard Rush (Adaptation)


Notes:
The dream project of director Richard Rush, THE STUNT MAN was completed and released nine years after its inception.