The Stunt Man came and went without a trace in 1980. It has since gone on to become a cult classic. Is The Stunt Man worthy of the attention? Let’s gird our wire harnesses and find out…
The Stunt Man’s plot is thus: a fugitive stumbles onto a movie set while evading the police and becomes the star’s stunt double.
He interacts with an egotistical director, a whimsical love interest, a wizen stunt coordinator and various other folks. In the end, life truths are learned. Maybe.
The Stunt Man
The Stunt Man sprang from the typewriter of novelist Paul Broduer.
Broduer wrote such classics as The Zapping of America: Microwaves, Their Deadly Risk, and the Coverup, Restitution: The Land Claims of the Mashpee, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians of New England and The Great Power-Line Cover-Up: How the Utilities and Government Are Trying to Hide the Cancer Hazard Posed by Electromagnetic Fields.
We can only guess Broduer was a huge hit at parties. I know I could have stood in a corner with him for hours and encouraged him to write a sequel to his microwave tome about the hazards of eating Hot Pockets before they are cool.
Alas, some dreams are not meant to come true.
The Stunt Man made the rounds in Hollywood and finally ended up in the lap of Richard Rush. Rush is the director who brought us Air America and Color of Night, where Bruce Willis couldn’t tell that one of his male patients was a woman. Truly, Bruce was progressive that way.
Whatever happened to Jane March anyway? She seemed poised to be the next Stacey Nelkin and then disappeared. Like the existence of Bigfoot, this is a mystery that may never be solved.
The Stunt Man In An Iron Mask
Eventually, a convergence happened. Someone with money crossed paths with someone with an idea and a movie was born. Melvin Simon, who produced such films as Porky’s, My Bodyguard and the gloriously insane, The Manitou, stepped up to the plate.
(Editor’s note: I reviewed The Manitou before LMO blew up. Maybe I should go back into my archives and resurrect that one, but I digress…)
Somehow, production netted Peter O’Toole to star as the film-within-a-film’s director. Then again, this should maybe not surprise us, as O’Toole also showed up in things like Supergirl (1984) and Phantoms (1998). Sometimes a great just needs to Michael Caine it up, Jaws III-style.
O’Toole is totally O’Tooling in The Stunt Man. He plays the part with a flamboyance more suited for the stage than the screen. One can almost see the veins in O’Toole’s neck stand out as he strains to be great in a movie that doesn’t seem to know what it is doing with itself. More on that later.
Perhaps, O’Toole’s most important contribution to The Stunt Man is showing the world that any type of shirt can be tucked into one’s pants, even sweaters. Otherwise, he seems to represent a god-like figure within the film, as he shapes reality to how he wants to present it to people.
The Stunt Man is littered with these types of allusions, but they are so clumsily delivered they might as well be presented via Powerpoint by Steve Urkel.
The Stunt Man of the Year
As awkwardly as O’Toole fits into the film, Barbara Hershey (The Entity, The Natural) has it a bit worse. She is supposed to be the siren at the center of the story that is worth escaping a movie site for at the end of the picture. For whatever reason, escaping a movie site in the universe of The Stunt Man requires putting a woman in the trunk of a car for, like, 12 hours.
My idea for escaping a movie site would go something like this: I walk off the lot and say “See you later, everybody…”
Hershey spends much of The Stunt Man aimlessly puttering around in various scenes. Sometimes she wears old-lady makeup and cries. Other times she runs through a puddle because she just can’t help herself. Her character is the kind of person that will stand on a table in the middle of a crowded restaurant and answer the question of why with, “Because I’m a free-spirit.”
No, you’re just kind of a twit…
The Stunt Man Without A Face
And who should star as the titular stuntman? That would be good old Steve Railsback. Railsback also doesn’t seem to know what he is doing exactly. He seems to be playing the part with the understanding that his character has a lot of internal rage, yet none of it really matters within the confines of an absurd universe where reality is negotiable…or something.
In the end, all we can really say is that at least Railsback got to star in Lifeforce. Actually, Lifeforce contains more answers about life than The Stunt Man, namely that public nudity can come dangerously close to conquering us all. Watch the skies, my friends, and the bustlines.
Now that I am on the subject, one can use a moment from Lifeforce to illustrate the entirety of The Stunt Man. You know that part at the end of Lifeforce when that one male energy vampire stands outside the church and says to Caine, “It’ll be much less terrifying if you just come to me?”
You remember how HUH? that moment was? That is what watching The Stunt Man is like…
The Stunt Man on the Moon
Ultimately, The Stunt Man is a weird hodge-podge of things that simply don’t work together. It is like eating dill pickles with orange slices. The film simultaneously tries to be serious, action-packed, romantic, metaphoric and comedic all at once.
It does not help that The Stunt Man’s score sounds like something more at home in an episode of Benny Hill than a feature film. Dominic Frontiere composed the score. He did a lot of TV work. His biggest movie credits are perhaps Hang ‘Em High, Chisum and Brannigan.
This odd mixture simply doesn’t work, which is kind of a shame. The plot is definitely something that could be mined better. For example, Bowfinger maybe touched upon similar territory. Yet, seeing Railsback act tortured while playing a fish-out-of-water in an epic war scene filled with bumbling extras while O’Toole oversees everything with aloof earnestness and Hershey flits about the edges with dingbat energy is simply jarring.
One has to ask themselves, who is The Stunt Man for? An Outposter could certainly watch it out of curiosity to see what all of the hubbub is about. Yet, one gets the sense that the only people who will truly enjoy The Stunt Man are folks who belong to a film club that meets once a month to bond over their disdain for populist entertainment and their feeling of superiority for understanding confused films that are actually brilliant beneath their murkiness.
When it comes to stunt man movies, I’d rather watch Hooper or The Fall Guy. On the other hand, neither of those films had a scene where Steve Railsback rages about his lost ice cream shoppe dreams. If you must know how that turns out, The Stunt Man is on YouTube. Skip to 1:41:30. For now, let’s rate this sucker and go home…
