Word: manically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...autographs, jobs, charity appearances, sex, or a hearing for some stupendously bad idea for a new movie. In addition, he's trying to get his current lady (Barrault) to leave her husband for him, flirting with a Philharmonic violinist (Harper), and obsessed with has long-lost relationship with the manic-depressive Dorrie (Rampling). Oh yes, the studio wants to change the ending of his latest film...
...becomes a series of vignettes about Melvin's life. His two wives, daughter and stepchildren develop as characters, but serve more as foils for Melvin's idiosyncracies. Some of the family adventures work well--the Dummar victory on a game show gives a wonderful picture of the event's manic nonsense as well as the Dummars' genuine exultation. Some do not--Melvin and his wife's service as professional witnesses in a Las Vegas marriage factory falls flat. Michael J. Pollard, the diminutive actor who played the sidekick in Bonnie and Clyde, returns to the screen after a long absence...
Edna Mae (Ellen Burstyn) is a faith healer without an orthodox faith. Though the deaf and the halt are cured at her touch, she is no manic Holy Roller, no snake-shaking spellbinder invoking God's immediate intervention for the sake of a fatter collection plate. She is a sensible Kansas widow, retrieved from a brush with death, who restores health "in the name of love." Love is all she wants to give to the two men in her life: her stern pa (Roberts Blossom), who responds to her proffered caress both as a seduction and a slap...
This is the premise of a classic thriller: a man without a past trying to survive in a house-of-mirrors world ruled by a manic, eloquent, grandly eccentric genius, a kind of prankish, omnipotent deity. But this is not enough for Rush. In its jumbled hyperactive way The Stunt Man is part corny romantic comedy, part whoop-it-up action exploitation flick, and high-brow, somewhat pretentious anti-war statement (circa Vietnam) and quickie-metaphysical study of Paranoia, Art, and the old Illusion/Reality enigma. The Stunt Man's got it all, even those big, capitalized questions of Significance, which...
...never passed away. The reason is that his friends Kaufman and Hart renamed him Sheridan Whiteside and painted an indelible portrait of him in his primary colors-venom, egocentricity and gush. Ever since this farce-comedy opened in 1939, it has induced fits of manic laughter...