Le diable en boîte

At the time Peter O'Toole was Academy Award nominated as Best Actor, for his portrayal of one-step-above-God-himself, Eli Cross in The Stunt Man, my movie going experience was limited to The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, Mary Poppins, and some post pubescent indulgences into the realm of Flint, Matt Helm, and James Bond.

Through the magic of video I was able to see Richard Rush's wonderful black comedy- And have never tired of it.

Had Mr. O'Toole and The Stunt Man not run headlong into the likes of Raging Bull, and Robert De Niro, I venture to say it would have garnered WINS, not just NOMINATIONS from the Academy that year.

Rent it…and while you're at it reach for `My Favorite Year' and make it a Peter O'Toole double feature.

You will not be disappointed.

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!

You want to see Peter O'Toole channeling David Lean as the megalomaniac director trying to make a WWI epic against all odds who will stop at nothing to "get the shot"? He goes berserk at his AD ("no one yells cut at my set!"), he often descends from the top of the frame in his crane like a deus ex machina, he insists that his cameraman keep shooting even though his stunt man is drowning. His WWI film is a long string of big action pieces woven together with slapstick shenanigans, people dancing Charleston on the wings of planes and gatecrashing German bordellos.

No, scratch that. You want to see Steve Railsback with a Charles Mansonesque gleam in his eye playing the 'Nam veteran who finds himself chased by the police into the set of said WWI movie where he is turned in the spur of the moment into the stunt man who he accidentally helped kill a few minutes earlier? No one knows what he's guilty of but O'Toole takes him under his wing because he carries that same madness he's looking for in his movie, 600 bucks at a time.

No? How about a million movies rolled into one, a chaotic, rampant, insane smorsgabord that is at once a comedy about the trappings of big budget film-making, a romance between a famous actress and a halfmad Vietnam veteran, a drama about an emotionally scarred man with no future that finds himself betrayed again and can do nothing but laugh crazily about it and yell after a helicopter for his thousand bucks? All this filled with cinematic references (King Kong, Wings) and constant games with the viewer's perception of what is real and what is fiction, the lines separating real world from film-making wizardry becoming dangerously blurred.

Well, if you answered yes to one of the above, there's only one movie for you, Richard Rush's THE STUNT MAN. Nine years in the making, this is for all intents and purposes his APOCALYPSE NOW, the sprawling film that signalled the pinacle and decline of its director's career. The logistics of the production must've been a nightmare yet perfectly reflect the chaotic nature of the film. This is the kind of movie that deserves praise for just getting made. It's one of the only films I can think of that can afford soaring melodrama, political critique, black comedy and plain absurdism in the same scene and magically pull it off.

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

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.