O Substituto

This is a very funny and entertaining movie that doesn't fit into any one category. It's about a slightly crazed movie director who is making a WW1 movie in Southern California who hires a fugitive to replace his top stuntman. Peter O'Toole gives perhaps his best performance ever as the egomaniacal filmmaker who will do anything, perhaps even murder someone, in order to protect his artistic vision. The underrated Steve Railsback is good also as the paranoid Vietnam vet turned fugitive from the law. The action scenes are very funny and well-done, especially the rooftop chase. The music score is appropriately clever and matches what's happening on screen. Real-life stunt man Chuck Bail has a good part as a stunt coordinator who shows Railsback the ropes. The editing techniques help blur the line between reality and make-believe. The film is a bit too long, though, and some key scenes go on longer than necessary. These are minor complaints, however, because a film like this doesn't get made very often anymore.

Peter O'Toole gives a marvellous performance as a film director in this film which looks (to an extent) behind the scenes of movie making. I originally saw this one Sunday afternoon at the cinema and I remember how enthralled I was. There were a few surprises when something turned out to be something else like a model maybe. But it wasn't until I got the DVD that I realised there were many layers to the film.

The director had great difficulty with the studios in various stages of making the movie and although it was originally intended as an anti-Vietnam film, that had to be changed as production got further away from the war years. So although it may have lost something along the way it gained other things in the process. To my mind this makes it a stronger and more intriguing film.

If you watch the documentary that accompanies the DVD a lot is explained which you don't actually realise whilst watching the movie. Watch the film again and you will probably have a renewed interest. You will probably see it a little differently. It's not an Academy Award winner (and I don't think it should have been). But it's a drama, a romance, a comedy and a lot more besides. It has its fans and friends as well as detractors. I liked it and still see it as good fun.

I won't carry on about the plot of this marvelous flick since it's already been adequately limned, but do let me emphasize a few points that have been kind of grayed out in other comments. The score by Frontiere is outstanding, from the up-tempo opening blast to the final credits. It's not only unnerving but vertigo inducing, so it supplements the plot perfectly. The photography is outstanding as well, the colors appallingly vivid, as in an MGM cartoon, which in this context is most apt. (It is a mystery/comedy/thriller/philosophical disquisition, after all.) The Hotel Coronado in San Diego has never looked quite so palatial, not even in "Some Like it Hot."

Rush's direction boggles the mind, to coin a phrase. The film begins with a helicopter. A hand pops out of the helicopter and drops a half-eaten apple. The apple bounces on the hood of a parked car. We follow without comment the apple, the line of events, and it turns out to be what gets the story moving.

There are multiple very strange touches throughout. As a movie star myself, having been a faceless extra in half a dozen films, I have to add that movies are simply not shot this way. An expensive and dangerous (and ultimately lethal) stunt is performed as we enter the actual narrative and there is only one camera rolling -- and that in a helicopter so far away that its engine can't be heard? But it doesn't really matter. The movie plays tricks all along with the difference between "reality" and "illusion," an old game into which it's difficult to inject more life, as this movie manages to do.

At one point, Railsback is told to perform a short if dangerous stunt, leaping from one roof to another. He does so, but the stunt escalates. Not only escalates but goes on and on, with Railsback unexpectedly crashing through ceilings and floors in a shower of glass before winding up in the midst of drunken, partying enemies who shout at him and laughingly lift his body above their heads and pass him around the room. It will shock you almost as much as it shocked him. O'Toole asks him after this long gag what it is he wants. Says Railsback: "Not to think I'm going crazy."

The smallest parts are done well. A very authentic-looking German soldier with a cheery old face and big white mustache is loading his rifle for a scene in which he and his comrades are going to fire at Railsback. "I hope those are blanks," Railsback tells him. "It doesn't say so on the box," replies the soldier with a friendly tone and a big smile.

Let me mention Eli Cross, the director, played by O'Toole. At one level this movie is made, through his character, into an examination of God, and his whimsical sense of responsibility towards the human beings whose lives he controls. "Eli Cross"? I mean -- okay -- Elihu, the crucifixion -- the whole JudeoChristian tradition is embodied in that cognomen. Cross has a habit of riding around the sky in a giant crane whose seat drops unexpectedly out of space and into the middle of peoples' conversations. Before the shooting of the final stunt, Cross raises his hand, looking at the horizon, and says something like, "I hereby decree that no cloud shall pass before that sun." And while shooting another scene, the cameraman calls "Cut." Cross pauses, then asks, "WHO called cut?" The cameraman explains that there were only a few seconds of film left on the reel so they had to cut at that point. Cross, like the angry God of the Old Testament, shouts that, "NOBODY cuts a scene except ME!" After chewing the cameraman out thoroughly, he fires him on the spot. You see, if a movie is supposed to resemble life, then ending a scene suddenly ends the filmic exposure of the two human conversants and only -- well, you get the picture. A lot of this rather obvious theological stuff seems to have gotten by unrecognized or at any rate uncommented upon. It doesn't need to be dwelt on.

There are already so many layers to this film that the viewer can afford to be only half aware of any one of them at a given moment. It stands by itself as a kind of very strange comedy. I didn't find Railsback's background as a Vietnam vet put on very thickly, by the way. It would be nice if God really were as accessible as Peter O'Toole is in this movie. All you would have to do to find salvation is jump through some well-defined hoops. As it is, though, I for one find myself muddling through from one day to the next simply hoping not to step on too many toes. Gimme a fiery hoop or a dive off a bridge any day. Just as long as my scene isn't cut too quickly.

When I first saw THE STUNT MAN, I was very enthusiastic about the film and raved about it to anyone who might be interested. I've watched it twice with some friends since, but they weren't very enthusiastic about it, so I can imagine that for many people it won't pay off. It's an ingeniously constructed film that takes some patience and attention to watch. Made by the erratic Richard Rush, this was his pet project for nine years. Although the direction is fine, it's mostly a virtuoso piece of scripting (credited to Rush and Lawrence B. Marcus, based on Paul Brodeur's novel) that makes this such a special film.

A short plot outline: Fugitive Cameron (Railsback) stumbles onto a movie set where megalomaniac director Eli Cross (O'Toole) promises to hide from the police if he replaces his ace stunt man, who got killed earlier on the set in a freak accident while filming a scene. Is Eli trying to capture Cameron's death on film while he is performing a stunt? Reality and imagination soon blur when Cameron grows increasingly paranoid because Eli Cross doesn't let anything or anybody get in the way of shooting his masterpiece the way he wants. He doesn't seem to care about human life, as long as his movie is shot in the way he wants it.

Railsback is an odd choice for the main role but apparently the makers wanted a "low-key" actor for the main part. Barbara Hershey gives a great performance but without Peter O'Toole's tour-de-force performance, I doubt if the film would have worked as well as it did, especially with such a challenging and multi-layered script. He delivers his lines with such vigor that you cannot look away, a grand performance by perhaps my favorite actor off all time. Such a pity that his (later) career mainly consisted of mediocre films at best and some disastrous ones, sadly... I cannot imagine this kind of film being made in Hollywood today and even back then it might be called a small miracle it got made in the first place, let alone released (in fact, it sat on the shelf for two years before release). Perhaps it's all a little too ambitious at times but with a cast like this and such a dazzling script, it's definitely worth the effort.

The DVD-release by Anchor Bay comes with an extra disc loaded with extra's. Lots of interviews, including one with O'Toole and a very peculiar - almost two-hour (!) - documentary about the making of the film, presented by Rush himself, almost worth seeing in itself.

Camera Obscura - 8/10

One of my favorite movies of all time. Must admit that I'm a bit biased since Peter O'Toole's one of my favorite actors of all time. This movie has NEVER gotten the attention that it deserves. Maybe that's, in part, due to the difficulties involved in categorizing it. I don't even know in which section of the video store I'd start looking.

Peter O'Toole is so swell in it. I love that enigmatic character, movie director Eli Cross! Like the movie (and O'Toole, for that matter), he's so hard to cubbyhole. You like him, but you don't trust him. Like Cameron/Lucky (Steve Railsback's escaped convict character) does, you NEED to know exactly where his motives lie ... all in good time. You know Cross'll do whatever's necessary to get "the shot", but he's still got a conscience ... right? Would Cameron have been better off (read safer) just staying in jail ... hmmm?

All the action in the film circles around this question and while the viewer (and Cameron) decide what to make of Eli, it's a fun trip through the world of filmmaking (how realistic a trip, I've no idea). Great performances by O'Toole and Railsback, along with Barbara Hershey, Allen Garfield, Alex Rocco and Sharon Ferrell add so much to the suspense.

See this movie. You can feel how much fun it was for the cast to make. Look at Eli's devilish grin as he tries to soothe Lucky's worries. Try to imagine how many other movies have you sympathizing for an escaped convict. And don't worry if you don't know what to make of mad genius filmmaker Eli Cross because nobody else does either, and if they do, they ain't talkin' ... that might spoil the movie!