The Stunt Man
by Richard Rush
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Alex Rocco, Allen Garfield, Barbara Hershey, Peter O'Toole, Steve RailsbackDirector: Richard Rush
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), DTS ES 6.1; English (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD-Video, NTSC, THX, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 130 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-11-20
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Starz / Anchor Bay
Movie Reviews of The Stunt Man
Movie Review: A Good Film Elevated To Greatness By A Brilliant Peter O'Toole
Summary: 5 Stars
By 1980, the year THE STUNT MAN was released, Peter O'Toole and his peers -- that infamous troupe of besotted British actors which included Richard Burton, Robert Shaw and Richard Harris -- were considered anachronisms by Hollywood. Fast living had aged them beyond their years, but more to the point, these classically trained Europeans, their mannered acting styles designed to project to the last rows of the Old Vic, seemed hopelessly dated compared with the introspective naturalism of America's latest generation of rising Method actors, led by De Niro. For the most part, this lot was best remembered by American audiences for their historical costume dramas and World War II epics of the '60s -- the kinds of films nobody was making anymore.
For O'Toole in particular, the glory days of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA were long gone -- his screen work had recently included TV movies and the big-screen abomination CALIGULA. THE STUNT MAN, an ambitious black comedy about filmmaking and paranoia, resurrected O'Toole's career and garnered him his sixth Best Actor Oscar nomination. The irony in this is that O'Toole's comic performance as a half-mad movie director willing to risk everything to finish his film is quite purposely based on the same flamboyant dramatics that marked the actor as old-world and out of date.
O'Toole's Eli Cross has three days to wrap his antiwar film, with both his ego and his career on the line, and so he slows for nothing, not even the accidental death of a stunt man. (Real-life directors have gone as far in pursuit of their goals.) In creating his character, O'Toole has mixed in touches of such directing legends as John Huston and David Lean, for whom he had worked. But Cross is no mere parody. Rather, Cross plays as a composite of Peter O'Toole's greatest hits: there are shades of Henry II, head of that ancient English dysfunctional family, whom O'Toole had played to perfection in both BECKET and THE LION IN WINTER. Well aware of the aptness of the director-as-king metaphor, O'Toole invests Cross with Henry's regal magnetism -- part warrior, part diplomat, part schemer.
But in another sly stroke of insight, O'Toole draws even more heavily on his role as Jack, the paranoid schizophrenic nobleman who's certain he's Jesus Christ in THE RULING CLASS. Standing on a lofty perch above his cast and crew, Cross booms out in a voice that needs no megaphone: "We must have this shot!... I thereby order that no camera shall jam, and no cloud pass before the sun!" O'Toole grins crookedly -- he knows Cross is only half-serious -- but he plays his megalomaniacal director as a man who wants his crew to believe he is the closest thing to a deity they're likely to meet. "If God could do the tricks we can do, he'd be a happy man," Cross insists, and it's O'Toole's delivery, brimming with a crazed self-confidence, that makes this the film's tag line.
O'Toole makes Cross larger than life, a screen presence whose hypnotic charm, more than his temper, reputation or title, is the true key to the manipulative power he wields. "I can't figure it out," says one character, an on-the-lam criminal whom Cross seduces into replacing the dead stunt man and risking his life on a movie set, "I can't take my eyes off the son of a bitch." It is an apt description of Cross the director, and a fitting tribute to O'Toole the actor, who roused himself from career torpor for one glorious performance which, in recalling the best moments of a bygone era, proved how compulsively watchable an old ham can be.
Summary of The Stunt Man
The "lost" sleeper hit of 1980 has since become one of the most revered cult movies of all time, largely due to its bawdy, irreverent story about the art and artifice of filmmaking and an outrageously clever performance by Peter O'Toole. As megalomaniacal film director Eli Cross, O'Toole plays a larger-than-life figure whose ability to manipulate reality is like a power-trip narcotic. The focus of his latest mind game is a fugitive (Steve Railsback) recruited to replace a stuntman killed during a recent on-set accident. In return for protective sanctuary, the fugitive takes a crash course in stunt work but soon discovers that he's the paranoid player in a game he can't control, with the dictatorial director making up the rules. Or is he? The Stunt Man is a game of its own, played through the fantasy of filmmaking, and half the fun of watching the movie comes from sharing the stuntman's paranoid confusion. Barbara Hershey has a smart, sexy supporting role as a lead actress who won't submit to her director's seemingly devious behavior; but it's clearly O'Toole who steals the show. Director Richard Rush adds to the movie's maverick appeal--in a career plagued by struggles against the mainstream studio system, Rush hasn't made a better movie before or since. The Stunt Man clearly represents the potential of his neglected talent. --Jeff ShannonComedy DVD Video
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