I *am* the movies

The Stunt Man



I bought this film fairly blind - it was a nice cheap limited edition off Amazon and had come highly recommended from everyone from DVD File to VW's Tim Lucas. I went in expecting a film about film, but came away with much more than that. The director, Richard Rush is a kind of curiousity. He made a series of biker/hippy type movies in the sixties, made the highly regarded Freebie And The Bean in the seventies, and has only made two feature films since then, this film and the generally awful (but funny) Color Of Night. The documentary on disc 2 is the only other film he's made in the past twenty years. So he's a little bit Terence Malick, a thoroughly prepared and researched filmmaker that always gives his all and then some.

The Stunt Man on it's most basic level is a highly entertaining film about the making of a movie involving an escaped convict Cameron (Steve Railsback) who is offered the job of a stunt man by the movie's director Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole). Cameron falls for the leady lady, Nina (Barbara Hershey) who has problems of her own. And it's one of the better films to look behind the camera, right up there with The Bad And The Beautiful and Sunset Boulevard.

Yet, as Rush explains in the documentary, there is much more to The Stunt Man than just the pitfalls of movie making, which are by the way, are deftly conveyed by Mario Tosi's camerawork, Dominic Frontiere's playful score and especially Gray Johnson's stuntwork. As with most movie within movies, The Stunt Man is about the perception of reality and how reality and fantasy can merge so that it can become impossible to tell one from the other. Initially when all of the gory soldier wounds are revealed on the beach, the onlooking tourists are shocked with horror. And when Cameron (Railsback) rushes to save the old lady, actress Nina (Hershey) and then finds out she's not an old lady, Nina asks Cameron to save her anyway.

The film is also about standing on your own two feet and at the same time, putting your trust and faith in other people. To accomplish this, you need actors who are capable of baring their souls for the camera and as a result, the performances in this film are quite extraordinary. Peter O'Toole was deservedly nominated for an Oscar for his role as Eli, unfortunately that year was particularly strong with male performances and DeNiro won for Raging Bull. Steve Railsback matches O'Toole scene for scene as Cameron and carefully dials his quiet intensity into pure madness as the film progresses. Barbara Hershey has never been more lovely in a film, and as mentioned before, puts her soul out on the line for all the world to see. But my favorite personal performance is by Allen Garfield (credited as Allen Goorwitz) as Sam the screenwriter. One of my own screenplays involves a screenwriter and I was never able to get a handle on the character until I saw this film. Sam is insecure yet courageous, and Garfield imbues him with significant humanity, stealing several scenes.

If you can still find this title at a bargain price, I recommend it. It's a limited edition, but my recently purchased copy was 21,612 out of 100,000 so I don't think it will sell out any time soon (it was published in 2001). Clearly not enough people know about this film - screw Bowfinger I say. In addition to the film, disc one includes an excellent commentary with most of the key crew and cast (Rush, O'Toole, Railsback, Hershey, Rocco, plus Sharon Farrell and Chuck Bail), plus deleted scenes, trailers, artwork, stills and the screenplay in the DVD-ROM portion. As mentioned before, disc two is the documentary, "The Sinister Saga Of Making The Stunt Man", a 2000 production which seems to have been made specifically for this DVD. An exceptional documentary (one of the rare exceptions where the filmmaker was allowed to make his own Making Of), it is quite avant garde in its presentation, but provides imperative information from the cast and crew into the artistic success and financial failure of the film.