The Stunt Man

"All they care about is story"

You've got to admire any film that opens on a dog licking its own balls. The Stunt Man is a hilarious and blackly cynical satire on relationships of power in filmmaking. Unlike a lot of other Hollywood films about filmmaking the emphasis here is very much on character, giving the film a certain timelessness that a relatively trivial film like What Just Happened is unable to match. The other big selling point for The Stunt Man that seperates it from lesser films is a great Oscar-nominated performance from Peter O'Toole. Coming from 1980, the film operates in a twilight between the golden new wave of American filmmaking of the '70s and the more entertainment-orientated pieces of quirk found in the thick of the '80s.

Cameron (Steve Railsbeck) is a disenfranchised Vietnam veteran on the run from the law. Eli (Peter O'Toole) is a megalomaniacal film director who's just covered up the death of a stunt man on his film. When the two meet, Eli strikes up an amicable deal - Cameron will assume the identity of the dead stunt man in order to hide from local law enforcement. At first it seems like a good deal, with Cameron getting to mingle with big name stars on the set of a movie, but Eli will stop at nothing to create the film he wants to make - a process that involves him manipulating both Cameron and the leading lady, Nina (Barbara Hershey), through external means. And as Cameron is off the radar this places him in a pretty dangerous position, and soon his sanity is hanging by a thread.

As I mentioned before, the characterisation is the key to this film's success in an arena where a lot of other films fail. The film's opening credits feature a motif that highlights the relationship between animal and master... dogs doing tricks, dogs trained to only like their owner, a buzzard shoed off a telegraph pole and fatally driven into the path of a helicopter. Cameron is very much the dog to Eli's master... as a soldier he's already predispossed to following orders, and his first appearance in the film has him looking very much like a stray mongrel. He also isn't too bright, and operates mostly on instinct, so his intellectual defences against Eli are fairly minimal. By contrast, Hershey's character is a method actor parody, but it's played realistically enough and with enough charm to not feel like an overt joke. The layers of method to her character actually serve a function in the script as well, providing enough enigma to intrigue and confuse Cameron.

And then there's Eli, played by O'Toole with that wonderfully aristocratic voice. O'Toole apparently based the character on David Lean (who famously directed O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia), creating a satirical devil of a man referred to by his cast and crew as 'Eli the Terrible'. When he says, "This film is my child", it's 100% believable, with that maniacal gleam in his eye and a creative confidence that puts an easy smile on his face while he literally calls the shots. As the film spirals out of control and gets more insanely ridiculous, so too do Eli's mindgames with Cameron and Nina. It echoes the folly of infamous projects like Heaven's Gate (also made in 1980) and One From the Heart, where acclaimed directors went off the rails when given too much power. Eli's film within this film reflects the director's creative dilemma when tackling controversial subjects; he wanted to make an anti-war picture during the Vietnam War but wasn't allowed to, and now that he can there's no longer a war to criticise.

The power struggle between Eli and Cameron cleverly balances between comedy and tragedy, never once tipping too far in either direction. I can see at least one major reason for this sublime tone, being that it keeps the audience on edge - we don't quite know what to expect, and the film doesn't let us know if it's a comedy or tragedy until the very last couple of minutes. The Stunt Man gets right to the core of the magic of movies by continuously playing with the viewer's perception of what's happening. It segues between real stuntwork to Railsbeck pretending to perform this stuntwork, and then shows us these stunts being faked in-film, though we also know that outside of the film's narrative the stunts are being performed by real stuntmen. On top of this, there are also questions regarding the safety of these stunts in the context of the film's story - we don't know for sure just how safe Cameron is in the hands of Eli. It's all very meta and clever. A real gem of a film.

DIRECTOR: Richard Rush
WRITER/SOURCE: Richard Rush and Lawrence B. Marcus. Based on a novel by Paul Brodeur.
KEY ACTORS: Peter O'Toole, Steve Railsbeck, Barbara Hershey, Allen Garfield, Alex Rocco, Sharon Farrell

RELATED TEXTS
- The 1970 novel The Stunt Man by Paul Brodeur.
- The only other film Richard Rush made after this was Colour of Night, which also played with ideas relating to perception.
- A documentary was made in 2001, The Sinister Saga of Making 'The Stunt Man'.
- Films about stunt work; The Devil Dared Me To, Stunt Rock and Stunts.
- Films about filmmaking; What Just Happened, The Bad and the Beautiful, Mistress, Special Effects, Swimming With Sharks and The Player.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Director, Best Actor (Peter O'Toole) and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Golden Globes - won Best Original Score. Nominated for Best Film (Drama), Best Director, Best Actor - Drama (Peter O'Toole), Best Screenplay and Best New Star (Steve Railsbeck)