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Richard Rush’s 1980 comedy was always one of the most distinctive items in Peter O’Toole’s filmography, a witty performance as an autocratic movie director that earned him one of his many (unconverted) Oscar nominations. After 46 years, The Stunt Man looks in some ways like a B-side to Lawrence of Arabia, about a possibly, definitely crazy person whose innate gift for leadership is going to endanger the troops much more than himself.
It’s a high-concept satire of … what, exactly? Of the movie business with all its hubris and conceit? Yes, it’s perhaps also an anti-war satire – although it’s more a satire of cinema’s inability to be anti-war when the movies have a vested interest in making war look exciting. But the black comedy and the raucousness are interleaved with weird, fierce stabs of extended seriousness and even anguish.
O’Toole plays Eli, the imperious director in charge of a spectacular first world war action drama with exploding planes and the like, megalomaniacally swooping around in his helicopter and sometimes perched on the camera crane from which he will descend, godlike, to issue orders and vinegary putdowns. He is over budget, over schedule and overstretched; reckless, irresponsible, cutting corners on safety.
When his stunt man drowns driving a car off a bridge into a river, Eli looks for a way of covering up the incident so that he won’t be charged with manslaughter. His prayers are answered by Cameron (Steve Railsback), a troubled Vietnam vet on the run from the police who blunders on to the set and eagerly accepts a job as the replacement stunt man, assuming the deceased’s identity. Cameron’s natural desperation makes him fearless and a natural for stunt work – and droll, capricious Eli decides he is amused by him, and knows he can ask him to do anything and poor Cameron can’t complain. Things are complicated when Cameron falls in love with the film’s leading lady Nina (Barbara Hershey), who has unfinished emotional business with the director himself.
In some ways, The Stunt Man is about a blurring of fact and fiction; for this dysfunctional film family with a maniac like O’Toole as its head, it really is life during wartime. Sequences of film-making chaos cut straight in and out of fictional melodrama. But what is so striking about The Stunt Man are those moments which really do look like documentary realism. O’Toole’s Eli presides over a long, boozy dinner (or is it lunch?) with the cast and crew in the middle of filming in the way you could in those days. And when the first AD presumes to call “cut” in the middle of a scene because there is only 33 feet of film left, Eli screams at him with authentic rage.
It’s all leading to a strange escapade for Cameron and Nina who feel that they are imprisoned by Eli, though Cameron’s very extended speech to Nina about what he did to get in trouble with the law and how he feels about her is a bit indulgent. Yet they add to the film’s cynical, salty flavour – plus the rooftop stunts really do look very dangerous.
