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The Stunt Man
So meta, it’s tedious
1980
Review: April 4, 2009
Director: Richard Rush
Starring: Steve Railsback, Peter O-Toole, Barbara Hershey, Allen Garfield
If you want, I don’t think it’s necessary.
THE SETUP:
Escaped criminal hides out by assuming identity of movie stunt man.
DISCUSSION:
This is one of those movies I remembered seeing ads for when it was out, and for some reason it struck me, for all these years, as something one would want to see. And I have finally realized this lifelong ambition! And like most things in life….
We open with a graphic of a buzzard turning into a real buzzard, upset by a police car, that also causes a dog that is licking its balls to move. The buzzard hits a helicopter, the guy in the helicopter drops an apple, and it lands on the police car. So you see, everything is connected! Every action has consequences, some of which come back to you! I suppose it’s clever, but it’s also cloying and obvious, and that would pretty much sum up the whole movie, as far as I’m concerned.
Okay, so we meet our star Steve Railsback as an escaped criminal named Cameron, although we never really use his name in the film. He is wearing a bad fake beard at the very diner where the cops are, and makes an escape out the back. Soon he ends up on a bridge, and this 20s roadster is coming at him. The driver motions for him to get out of the way, and suddenly goes over the side in the car. Camero is freaked, and suddenly the helicopter swoops down out of the sky and Peter O’Toole stares at him in that hyper-meaningful way endemic to the late 70s.
Then, ahhh, a brief respite as we enjoy a special Dusty Springfield song, very much in the manner of “Windmills of Your Mind.” Yeah, but then we have to return to the film. They are now filming a scene on a beach, and Cameron is there, and these planes come in and bomb, and soon the beach is strewn with gory dead bodies. The director, O’Toole as Eli, yells cut, but no one gets up for a second! The bystanders are upset! Then the extras get up and reveal their severed heads to be just movie magic! Then Cameron spies this old woman in the water, and rescues her! But she’s not really an old woman, it’s Barbara Hershey as Nina, in old woman make-up. But she knows Cameron’s rescue was real, and she admires that. Then Eli lets Cameron know that he knows he’s an escaped convict—and offers him the chance to hide out from the police by impersonating the stunt man who died on the bridge. Almost everyone in the cast knows he’s not the real guy, but they agree to go along with it as well.
They shave him and bleach his hair. He continues to flirt with Nina, and she him. He is going to stand-in for the hero, a big blond buffoon, on this war film. There’s a lot of build-up to shooting a big action scene in this hotel—the movie goes with the conceit that they would be shooting explosions and breaking windows with regular paying guests also staying in the hotel—and during the shooting of the action scene, our movie briefly enters the movie they’re shooting, and BECOMES that movie. Only when the scene is finished, do we come back out to the movie set. And if you are not prepared to have your assumptions about what is real and what is fantasy played with in this way, clearly this movie is way over your head—and hopes you know it.
So Cameron is a little freaked by the danger of that scene. Separately, Eli tells someone that he is fascinated by the energy Cameron brings to be film, being as he is an escaped con: "It's not what he's eating, but what's eating him that I'm interested in." Regardless, Cameron starts to suspect that his life means nothing to the wildly flamboyant and narcissistic Eli, and that Eli may in fact be trying to kill him. This becomes the "suspense" and "interest" of the remainder of the film—is Eli trying to kill Cameron? Although I must confess I found it neither suspenseful nor interesting. The police come to investigate [including the attractive and talented Alex Rocco from Detroit 9000], Cameron gets more deeply involved with Nina [the only role in which Barbara Hershey has been charming and not hyper-annoying], Eli gets more egomaniacal, and Cameron worries that the final big stunt he has to shoot—the recreation of the roadster plunge from the bridge—will be his own death, that Eli wants to capture on film.
I just didn't like it. Smart, clever, meta movies like this run a danger of getting stale, and while this may have blown people's minds with its many "What is real and what are the illusions of film?" layers in 1980, these things are a little musty almost 30 years later. Not to mention that Brian De Palma addresses them all far more interestingly and with less pretention. And if one is not getting engaged with the ideas, the movie taking its sweet time to run through them all, added to the level of self-satisfaction this movie's tone takes, it can all start to grate and make the movie wear out its welcome. And if that has happened, the trumped-up suspense and forced romance and "in-your-face" confrontations and such can really start to annoy. I have a friend who is not a stupid person and he was really into this movie, so I can see where, if you were getting into the ideas, you would appreciate this film's attempt at being an intellectual exercise. If not, you might end up like me, who spent the final moments yelling at Cameron's final bits of dialogue: "Just shut up! SHUT UP!"
Peter O-Toole is good. Railsback, not so much. He never seemed like a living character so much as a cipher for all the big, big ideas, and this eventually got quite irritating. Hershey, like I said, was actually dewy and charming here—especially if all you know her from is Beaches and other such annoyances, but definitely not worth watching the movie for. The director, Richard Rush, started out making bikersploitation movies, then directed Freebie and the Bean. His next film after this one was the Bruce Willis / Jane March "erotic thriller" [and notorious flop] Color of Night, made 14 years later. He hasn't had another film since.
So there you go. Ambitious, it's true, but irritating. It's only 130 minutes, but seems like three hours. I'm really glad I never have to watch this again.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you’re into Lovecraft. Then again, you could just read Lovecraft.
