Spills for Thrills

Mary Wiggins smack Harvey Parry in the kisser, sending him staggering back. He returns the favor with a roundhouse that tumbles her down a flight of stairs. She gets up and goes to jump out an airplane -- let's hope the parachute works. Meanwhile, Parry goes to crash his car into the one Allen Pomeroy is driving. They'll have to do it again, since Parry's car didn't turn over. All in a day's work for Hollywood's stuntmen and stuntwomen!

Once upon a time, these were the point and entirety of movies, slapstick comedies and shorts in which the point was to crash an airplane into a barn. Audiences roared with laughter, and rightly so. But audiences keep demanding more, and cinema evolves, and what once was an entire film is compressed into shorthand, rendered a word in cinema's vast vocabulary. That's what happens here.

I saw this short on TCM and was very pleasantly surprised. It's interesting, educational, and entertaining... and it's NOT a film promo thinly disguised as an educational short like many of the old shorts that pop up on TCM.

This short is a tribute to the work of the stuntmen and stuntwomen of Hollywood, and it demonstrates their work with numerous film clips from the silent era up through the 30's. We are shown a wide variety of examples of stunt work like car stunts and crashes, western wagon crashes, human high dives, plane flying stunts and crashes, fist fighting, falls, running on the top of moving trains, etc. Obviously, many of these stunts are a little tame by today's standards, but good stuff in the context of their era. I spotted a couple of camera tricks, but most of the clips are good solid stunt work.

There's a nice segment where stuntwoman Mary Wiggins (who is rather cute, as the narrator points out) and stuntman Harvey Parry "face off" and perform some stunts. There's a very interesting segment which shows some "stunts gone bad", including Harvey Parry and Allen Pomeroy's two failed attempts to drive a car through a dusty explosion, off a small cliff and through a wooden shack. And the final segment shows those two stuntmen working together again on the planning, executing and filming of a two car crash on a movie set.

Among the most interesting items are several stop motion sequences which show us the actions (and very quick decision making ability) of the stuntman during the stunt. There's also some corny but effective humor in this short to keep the mood light. And there's enough interesting tidbits (that the average person wouldn't know) to make this short educational as well.

I've watched a lot of old shorts on TCM which purport to be educational documentary shorts about the film business... but quickly morph into promos for an upcoming film or for a number of recent films. MGM was especially guilty of this tactic. However, although this Warner Bros. short uses tons of film clips, they are simply used as examples of stunt work and for entertainment, not for promotional purposes. In fact, the source films for the clips are never even identified.

Definitely worth 20 minutes of your time.

It's a Warner Bros. Clip show for stunt work. It's great. It's basically 19 minutes of Jackie Chan post credit scenes with a couple of stunts set up for this short. It's all real and that's what's so impressive. The aircraft work is the most impressive. There are some standard stuff but there are some really dangerous close calls. Even the showcased roll down the stairs seems to show the lady getting a hard knock on the head. These folks must have a ton of concussions. There is no story here but at least, some stunt people get their names mentioned.

Spills for Thrills (1940)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Exciting Warner short pays tribute to the stuntmen in Hollywood. Real life stuntmen Harvey Parry, Allen Pomeroy and Mary Wiggins are on hand to show us some new stunts as well as clips from various films. The best part of the film is when they show various stunts that went wrong including one amazing scene with Parry and Pomeroy trying to make a car go down a cliff but it ends up flipping upside down.

This film isn't on DVD yet but you can catch it on Turner Classic Movies. It's well worth searching for.