Heck Of A Guy

Seeing The Stunt Man Again For The First Time

I suspect the most frequent (and reasonable) response to the recommendation that a given movie requires more than a single viewing would be an anguished expression of incredulity with second place going to a begrudging “maybe” attached to multiple qualifiers (for example, “Maybe, if the movie is free and less than an hour long – and has a lot of nudity”).

Being content with watching The Stunt Man (released in 1980) only once, however, is equivalent to being satisfied with a single instance of sex; in both cases, one should consider the possibility that he or she missed something rather significant the first time around.

The Stunt Man is chock-full of dandy themes of the sort that start with capital letters:

• God & Man, War & Peace
• The Meaning Of Love
• Sacrificing Intimacy In The Service Of Creativity
• Trust Vs Suspicion
• Power & Narcissism
• Chaos & Nonconformity
• The Heroic Quest
• Life & Death
• Myth Creation (i.e., movie-making)

These are, however, small potatoes in comparison to the dynamic that generates the power of The Stunt Man: The Confluence Of Reality & Illusion.

Although the movie’s two minute trailer cannot explicate the nuanced treatment of this theme, it does focus on and provide examples of the notion that “nothing is as it seems:”

The Stunt Man Trailer

Even a cursory survey of pertinent movie reviews demonstrates a distinct demarcation between those who deride what they view as the movie’s far-fetched plotting, unconvincing love story, continuity issues, and believability in general (let’s call these reviewers, grownup versions of that petulant 12 year old boy who always seems to sit behind us when a magician performs, sneering that “it’s a trick” and “it’s not really magic,” The Fearful, Convention-Clinging, Soulless Zombies) and those like Pauline Kael (“[The Stunt Man is] a virtuoso piece of kinetic filmmaking”) who are fascinated by the interdependence of and dazzling interplay between fantasy and reality (let’s call these folks The Ones Who Get It).

The key to earning a place in the select Ones Who It group is recognizing that Coleridge wrote about not the “suspension of disbelief,” but the “willing suspension of disbelief.”

The cinematography of The Stunt Man is skillful enough and the script intelligent enough to seduce a nonresistant viewer who can tolerate confusion and ambiguity into its funhouse, but it is, after all, only a movie, not a virtual reality experience. Anyone determined to defend against the concomitant threats and charms of the film’s erasure of the distinction between reality and fantasy will be able to maintain a safe psychological distance from such uncertainty – and from recognizing what this film has to offer.

The Stunt Man uses an armamentarium of methods to intermingle reality and fantasy within an insistently artificial environment, including switches in point of view between the movie that is The Stunt Man and the movie being filmed within the frame of The Stunt Man, smoke and mirrors (literally as well as metaphorically), accidental misunderstandings, deliberately misleading dialog, jump cuts and deep transitions that disclose a changing reality, misinterpreted reactions (e.g., an expression of apparent terror is revealed to actually be sexual exaltation), disguises (see Barbara Hershey’s changing appearance below), trompe l’oeil, movie stunts, audio and visual puns, and much, much more.

The Stunt Man Plot Summary

Loosely based on Paul Brodeur’s novel of the same name, the story line deals with a Messianic director (Eli Cross, played by Peter O’Toole) making a movie in which a Vietnam vet (Cameron, played by Steve Railsback) becomes, by accident, the stunt man.

Escaping from police, Cameron stumbles onto a movie shoot and (maybe/maybe not) causes the death of the stunt man. The director, instead of turning Cameron in, hires him to be the replacement stunt man in return for sanctuary from the law.

The leading lady (Nina, played by Barbara Hershey) and Cameron, of course, fall in love.

And there’s the requisite big finish featuring Suspense! Love! Life & Death! (AKA thematic resolution with a flourish).

The plot is propelled almost solely through the director’s manipulations of his movie and his actors to produce the effects he wants, even if doing so puts the actors at risk psychologically and physically.

Eli directs the film with the fierceness and high-handedness typical of those endowed with divine right, (Iin his DVD commentary, Peter O’Toole describes basing his character on David Lean, who had directed O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.)) a connection he makes clear with proclamations such as this one in which he explains that the sponsoring studio will not interfere “‘because they know that if they touch my film I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them and I’ll eat them.” I’m not sure how to explain it but O’Toole’s recitation of these lines inspires awe, evokes laughter, and is altogether delightful.

In parallel with Eli’s orchestration of his file, The Stunt Man itself pulls the audience’s strings – and more. Some of the characters’ reactions, for example, seem forced or inappropriate, but always by being a few degrees off-center rather than being outlandish.

The Sinister Saga Of Making The Stunt Man

There is a two disc version of The Stunt Man that includes, along with the movie itself, The Sinister Saga Of Making The Stunt Man, which describes, in a rather heavy-handed, redundant manner, the 10 years of travail required to finally get this flick on the screen.

The film was completed in 1978 but not released until 1980 when it opened in a few theaters in exactly three cities.

It was never a big draw at the theaters although the critics loved it, it won a few awards, and it achieved a cult status. While I am obviously an enthusiast about The Stunt Man, I must advise the first time viewer to defer The Sinister Saga. Until one is possessed of a full-fledged conviction that The Stunt Man is a great movie, The Sinister Saga is more likely to overload than enlighten.

Music From The Stunt Man – The Best Movie Soundtrack You’ve (Probably) Can’t Identify

In contradistinction to the The Sinister Saga, the score by Dominic Frontiere,¹ who was also responsible for the music in Hang ‘em High, Color of Night, Velvet, Who Is the Black Dahlia?, and Cleopatra Jones, is accessible to anyone and is an unalloyed joy, perfectly complementing the movie’s action without overwhelming it. I finally tracked down and purchased the soundtrack (available only on vinyl) and, after playing well over a hundred times, still find it enchanting.

The Music, the Movie, and Your Hit Parade

The score of The Stunt Man consists of several songs with similar musical elements. Of the ten tracks² at least seven are easily identified as musically related. The Heck Of A Guy recommendation for your consideration as an exemplar song is a heroic piece with the somewhat uninspiring title of Film Caravan.

Film Caravan: Musical Features

Film Caravan is an exuberant, sly, grandly joyous instrumental with an ominous, almost menacing introduction and a simple fade-out ending.

Listen To Film Caravan

Film Caravan from The Stunt Man Soundtrack

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Film Caravan In Context

While it’s not necessary to have seen The Stunt Man to appreciate the music of Film Caravan, it may be helpful to place the music in its native setting.

The following screenshots depict the action on the screen taking place while Film Caravan plays:

The opening bars ominously portend – a parade of children on bikes. It’s one of many musical jokes in the movie. The can in the lower right quadrant is a recurrent motif extending from the first frames of the movie. In this scene, t he earliest indication of the oncoming caravan is the trembling of the can, much like the glass of water shaking with the approach of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park.

The children are followed by a disparate caravan of cars, trucks, an RV, a crane, and, of course, a huge truck carrying a Dusenberg built in the 1920s.

As noted, this is happy music, and these are happy people.

Note the subtle phallic symbolism.

The Stunt Man is a happily heterogeneous, joyfully jumbled occasion – and this is its parade. The modern, overwhelmingly massive truck carting the old Dusenberg guarded by World War I German soldiers is just another float.

From the impressive and anachronistic truck loaded with an automobile and individuals from another era, the movie returns to the modern hodge-podge necessary for movie making.

And back to a guy riding a phallus. (Note the fellow reclining on the crane in the lower left quadrant.)

With everything in place for the final scene, the music fades out.

Again With The Multiple Viewings

In fact, the movie itself is so saturated with movement, irony, and nuance that it may require two or more viewings to appreciate what is obviously a labor of love. This is that rare movie that can be watched three times with the audience feeling more entertained and interested than they were after the first viewing. The strengths that make The Stunt Man stand up to repeated shows, however, are likely the same reasons it was never a box office hit.

Regardless, The Stunt Man has a wonderfully literate and funny script, good to great actors, and intriguing directing. It is witty, nuanced, and cerebral but also suffused with action.

It is no surprise that the quote that best summarizes the essence of the movie belongs to Peter O’Toole’s Eli Cross:

Do you not know that King Kong was just three foot six inches tall? He only came up to Faye Wray’s belly button! If God could do the tricks that we can do he’d be a happy man!

_____________________

1. Dominic Frontiere: accomplished accordionist, great composer of movie scores, failed criminal.

   

   Dominic Frontiere was a first known as a jazz accordionist, soloing at Carnegie Hall at age twelve and then playing with a number of big bands. In the mid-1950s, he came to Las Angeles, working his way into the musical directorship of 20th Century Fox. He produced scores for several movies there while also recording jazz. He may be best known for creating the part-music, part-sound effects theme to the Outer Limits. He composed music for numerous television shows, including the Rat Patrol, Branded, and The FBI,

   Frontiere became head of Paramount’s music department in the early 1970′s, where he again worked on a combination of television and film score, while concurrently orchestrating popular music albums for, among others, Chicago. He won a Golden Globe for the score to the 1980 film The Stunt Man. He then embarked on a series of movie soundtracks, beginning with Hang ‘Em High and including On Any Sunday, Brannigan, and Chisum, which led to his work on The Stunt Man, for which he won a Golden Globe. He has since composed the music for many other TV and movie presentations.

   He also spent nine months in a federal prison in 1986 for scalping 16,000 1980 Super Bowl tickets he obtained through the owner of the Las Angeles Rams, who happened to also be his ex-wife, Georgia Frontiere. He was convicted of failing to report his $500,000 profit to the IRS, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to a year and a day in prison, three years probation, and a $15,000 fine. [↩]

2. The songs from the Stunt Man Soundtrack follow:
   1. Film Caravan
   2. The Chase
   3. Bits & Pieces
   4. Southern Belle
   5. The Stunt Man-End Title
   6. Bedroom Horns
   7. Training
   8. The Stunt Man-Main Theme
   9. Crane
   10. The Stunt Man-Main Title [↩]