Classic Movie Review: 'The Stunt Man' Starring Peter O'Toole

The Stunt Man (1980)

Directed by Richard Rush

Written by Lawrence B. Marcus, Richard Rush

Starring Peter O'Toole, Steve Railsback, Barbara Hershey

Release Date June 27th, 1980

Published May 8th, 2024

The Stunt Man is a wildly inventive and entirely incoherent exercise in style and storytelling. Directed by Richard Rush, The Stunt Man has an intriguing premise that gets overshadowed by a director eager to experiment with film style and editing. I appreciate what Richard Rush is going for but it's a failed experiment as the stylistic touches and innovations leave us with a story that is impossible to follow because scenes are missing or truncated in service of Richard Rush's desire to play with the toys and tools of filmmaking.

The intriguing story of The Stunt Man finds a former Vietnam Veteran, played by Steve Railsback, on the run from the cops for an unknown crime. Cornered at a diner, the vet manages to sneak away. However, in the process of his getaway, the vet wanders into a movie scene as it is being shot. A stunt man is performing a car stunt and angrily drives right at the vet who is standing on a bridge that happens to be the location for this scene. In fear for his life, the vet throws a large rock at the car barreling towards him that causes the car to drive off the bridge.

The stunt driver is killed and the incident is witnessed and filmed by the film's director, Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole). Once again, our unnamed vet flees the scene. This time he winds up at a nearby resort where he once again sees the movie in production. A beach at the resort is being strafed by fake gunfire by a stunt plane. Smoke covers the area as bombs fall and when the smoke clears, the audience of resort patrons are shocked to see mangled bodies and corpses strewn across the beach. Their shock and horror becomes good natured laughter as the director calls cut and the stuntmen and extras lift themselves out of the sand and remove their broken, burned and battered fake body parts and wounds.

As the vet surveys the scene, he watches as an elderly woman approaches the lead actor for an autograph. She wanders down the beach and the vet follows her curiously, wondering where she could be headed. It's a good thing that he does because the old women slips on some rocks and falls in the ocean, forcing the vet to leap in and save her. Soon after, the woman removes her makeup and reveals herself to be movie star Nina Franklin (Barbara Hershey). Nina was testing the believability and durability of her old lady makeup, which she claims to have done herself. Nevertheless, she allows the vet to rescue her to a standing ovation of the assembled crew, including the director.

The police have arrived, in the form of an angry police chief, played by Alex Rocco. He wants to know what happened on the bridge and specifically, he wants to know what happened to the stunt man in the car? In a moment of invention, Eli Cross claims that the unknown veteran is in fact, Burt the stuntman, rescued from his watery end and back at work already on the set. Wanting to avoid arrest, the vet agrees, he's Burt the stuntman, and thus begins a tenuous and dangerous bargain. The vet will become Burt and Eli will use the secret the two men share to force 'Burt' to perform one death defying stunt after another until he gets the shot that he wants, the crescendo of his anti-war movie to end all war movies.

As I mentioned, this is a really clever premise. Eli can push New-Burt to the brink of death to get the stunts he wants performed and if New-Burt doesn't comply, he will be found out and arrested, not only for the crimes he committed in the first place, but for killing the late stuntman. Sure, Eli risks getting into trouble for conspiring with New-Burt, but that's a slap on the wrist compared to the crimes that New-Burt is facing. Plus, Eli has Hollywood on his side and can manipulate evidence as he pleases. He could also get New-Burt killed doing a stunt and remove any evidence of his complicity.

If The Stunt Man kept things as simple as my description, we'd be talking about a pretty great thriller with elements of Hitchcock and De Palma's Blow Out. Sadly, director Richard Rush subverts his best elements by dragging out his action scenes and editing the film in a fashion where you can't tell which movie you are watching, The Stunt Man or the unnamed movie within the movie. Though, New-Burt, as I have been calling him here, is just a stunt man, he stars in scenes from the movie within the movie as he runs across rooftops, dodges Nazi gunfire, and generally runs through scenes in single unbroken takes that the film makers of the movie within the movie could not possibly have captured.

Ah, but, therein lies the rub dear reader, the camera is capturing everything. The view we are seeing is the camera, we're in the perspective of O'Toole as the director, we're behind the camera as the action is being captured and the chaotic scene before us, while it carries the flaws of flubbed steps or comical pratfalls, these are things that the movie within the movie will edit around to make their movie. So while we are nitpicking that the movie within the movie would require endless days of set ups and set dressing and safety measures to accomplish this series of scenes of our hero running across a rooftop, director Richard Rush has the out, the cheat, that obviously he did capture all of this in a seemingly unbroken take because it's all there on the screen, we're watching it in the guise of watching the movie, The Stunt Man.

Are you confused? Confusion is perfectly understandable. I was confused. It's meta before meta became a thing. Because the plot of the film is centered on New-Burt and his growing belief that Eli Cross is trying to kill him via the elaborate stunts in the movie within the movie, director Richard Rush blurs the line between New-Burt's paranoia and things that can be explained away as the magic of making a movie. Thus when New-Burt falls through a roof and is assaulted by Nazis in a pub before being dropped at the foot of the camera behind which is Eli Cross, he can angrily claim to have been put in harms way while Cross can claim that it was all in the making of the movie within the movie.

The transitions between New-Burt and the world of the movie within the movie are intentionally blurry but also confounding. Richard Rush uses the tools of filmmaking very precisely to confuse us but he takes it too far and renders his plot a complete mess. This is not helped by the fact that star Steve Railsback appears to be just as confused as we are. The meta maneuvering of the fake world of the movie and reality of the the world around the movie is supposed to underline New-Burt's tenuous grip on reality but it renders his performance and our identification with him as the main character, a cloudy, messy, and indecipherable series of unpredictable shifts in tone and behavior.

For example, a subplot in The Stunt Man, not the movie within The Stunt Man, has New-Burt forming a romance with Nina that is utterly confounding. What Nina finds attractive about this scraggly, mumbling, angry loner type is never communicated on screen. One minute he's stalking her, the next she's flirting with him and he's giving her nothing. After their relationship is established, a scene has him angrily rebuke her for seemingly no reason, he just starts the scene angry and grows angrier and then he has to desperately try to win her back in the next scene. When New-Burt finds out that she used to sleep with Eli he flies into a feral rage and she still eagerly professes love for him. All the while, what motivates New-Burt's changes in attitude are left on the cutting room floor because the plot is centered on his tenuous grip on reality.

The movie is even more incomprehensible than I can describe. My plot synopsis is accurate but I am having to leave out a lot of elements that make very little sense in order to bring the plot to a place of clarity. My good intention is to show that there was a really good movie buried in the rubble of The Stunt Man and I truly believe that is the case. Sadly, director Richard Rush could not get out of his own way. His desire to meld the fake world of Hollywood with the real world of his movie, an epic troll-job of editing tricks and choices to leave out key pieces of visual information, undercuts a plot that could have been the foundation of a really good inside Hollywood thriller.

The Oscars make my point in a way as Peter O'Toole's performance was nominated for Best Actor, even as the role is clearly a supporting role. O'Toole's droll, witty, and malevolent performance is superb and classically Peter O'Toole. I can't argue with him getting an Oscar nomination, though, again, this was not by any means a Lead performance. O'Toole's performance is fantastic and in alternative universe, he alone could have rendered The Stunt man an all time classic. As it is, the film is an oddball anomaly. It wastes a great Peter O'Toole performance and a killer premise in order to play around with the tools of movie making. In his attempt to blur the already negligible lines of reality and fiction, movies and the 'real world,' Richard Rush ended up blurring his entire movie.

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