Word: stunting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Stunt Man Richard Rush succeeds breathtakingly in infecting his audience with the fun of movies; the movie rollicks on its way at an exhilirating pace, crammed full of playful action, hair-raising stunts and cinematic fiddling. Unfortunately--perhaps for fear of not being in some way Significant--Rush strives too hard for more and flaws a most remarkable film. In his anxiousness not to be merely entertaining, Rush injects overblown and spurious material that interferes with the pure amusement of the spectacle--as if there were something so mere about good entertainment that the filmmaker...
...from the police for some unknown crime. A near brush with death in his desperate escape from arrest brings him into the distorted movie-set world of a flamboyant, god-like director (Peter O'Toole) and his company on location near San Diego. The company's star stunt man has been killed and the arrest must be temporarily concealed; the fugitive needs a refuge until the heat is off. The director has seen that this hard-bitten desperado was indirectly responsible for his stunt man's death, and, suggesting to Railsback that his options are a bit limited, offers...
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...
...Stunt Man never comes close to being the trashy, indulgent mess it could easily have been. The movie is rescued by its director's brilliant gamesmanship; Richard Rush is a brilliant trickster who can bring a magical, dancing glow even to lackluster materials. Despite all the superfluous innuendos of Meaning, the impotent love story, the seductive but empty-headed banality of the lady-star (Barbara Hershey), and a screenplay that at times suggests that talkies were a big mistake, Rush has created a nerve-tingling celluloid magic show. Rush is a master of the infinite details of the surface...
...Stunt Man is a catalogue of optical stunts, editing stunts, camera stunts. Rush is always present playing little tricks, making a subliminal point with a telling camera angle, making some point (often lost on the viewer) with a shock cut to another scene. And he always makes sure you know he's there. We see the god-director Eli Gross flying around in a camera crane high against a bright blue sky, making grand proclamations in his Shakespearian high camp, and when he blows a bubble with his gum it pops with an immediate cut to the thunderous roar...