The Fractured Mirror 2.0 #6 The Stunt Man (1980)
Quentin Tarantino has famously done wonderful things for the careers and lives of countless character actors like the late Robert Forster, whose career came back in a big way after decades in the cinematic wilderness with his career-reviving, Oscar-nominated turn as bail bondsman Max Cherry in Jackie Brown.
Tarantino is a character actor’s best friend and most loyal benefactor. A peerless student and creature of Hollywood, Tarantino fills his movies with familiar, if half-remembered faces like Steve Railsback, who could be forgiven for expecting a call from the Oscar-winning auteur after learning that his latest movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, would be a loving deep dive into Hollywood’s past involving the Manson Family and the relationship between a television actor and his stunt man.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s premise couldn’t align more beautifully with the giddy apexes of Railsback’s career. He rose to fame playing Charles Manson on television in the well-received 1976 mini-series Helter Skelter, based on Vincent Bugliosi’s best-seller, then made an indelible imprint on cult cinema with his intense, wild-eyed lead performance as the tormented title character of The Stunt Man, Richard Rush’s masterful 1980 portrayal of moviemaking as a harrowing crucible with the power to destroy and kill, not just corrupt or spoil, adapted from Paul Brodeur’s unclassifiable 1970 novel.
Railsback was a definitive Charles Manson before playing The Stunt Man, not just a stuntman, in a towering masterpiece that, despite coming out in June of 1980, today feels like the last great film of the New Hollywood of the late 1960s and 1970s.
The Stunt Man has all the hallmarks of a New Hollywood boundary pusher. It possesses a literary air of deep moral ambiguity as well as terribly flawed anti-heroes ready, even eager, to transgress the laws of man and God in pursuit of their goals, survival and a deeper, truer form of art. It’s also a deeply meta meditation on the artifice of the moviemaking process that continually toys with our perception of what is real and what is Hollywood make-believe with a level of ambition that reflects, if does not quite match, the wildman audacity of the production at its center, an anti-war manifesto that alternately suggests Francis Ford Coppola’s experiences going upriver filming Apocalypse Now and Stanley Kubrick and Werner Herzog making great, timeless art of extraordinary vision, scope and intensity by driving themselves and their casts to the point of madness in pursuit of perfection.
The Stunt Man was a 1970s kind of movie unfortunate enough to be released in the 80s in part because it focuses on a beloved archetype of that outlaw era: a scruffy, desperate criminal on the very fringes of society who is dark and tormented, haunted by ghosts and emotionally scarred in ways that are immediately apparent but also linger deep under the surface.
Railsback plays Cameron, an angry, rage-filled Vietnam veteran who alternately suggests Manson with his beard, long hair and air of psychotic, sociopathic intensity and Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo, another man of violence defined by his traumatic experiences fighting in Vietnam whose unhinged warrior soul won’t allow him to re-socialize neatly back into polite civilian society.
On the run from the law, this desperate man accidentally stumbles onto the set of an ambitious period film set during World War I about the madness and futility of war, directed by megalomaniacal director Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole). When Burt (played by Railsback’s brother Michael), the stuntman executing a treacherous aquatic stunt, dies in the line of duty and the police come sniffing around, Eli improvises a fiction that gets them both out of a jam and off the hook for their crimes.
With the help of a shave and some blonde hair die, Cameron becomes a whole new man. Eli convinces/forces him to take over for Burt in a professional as well as existential capacity. Burt was a stunt double for the lead actor in the film. Hastily and pragmatically “re-born” as the “new” Burt, Cameron essentially becomes the double of a double.
If a movie star does their job right the whole world knows about it. If a stuntman does their job correctly no one knows about it. Their art lies in their invisibility. They aren’t just invisible: they’re self-negating, since a really great stunt performed by a double will have audiences assuming the star pulled it off themselves, at great risk to their safety and lives.
Eli, in his crazed zeal to create art and truth in a corrupt and degraded world, seems not just willing, but eager to have Cameron, who doesn’t have much choice in the matter if he wants to avoid being turned over to the police, perform the ultimate stunt, one that looks and feels real because it is real, right down to the fatality.
Cameron is the product of violent, brutal worlds, hyper-masculine realms that have left him with clear-cut PTSD from the military and prison but prepared him to live and work and even thrive in an even crazier, even wilder and more lawless carnival of horrors: the film industry.
In scraggly New Hollywood character studies of the late 60s and 70s, the more palpably and intensely a character radiated profound mental illness and criminality, the more irresistible they were to the opposite sex. Sure enough, Cameron has a heavy Manson vibe and an aura that silently but powerfully conveys, “I’ve killed before, possibly even in the course of combat, and I will undoubtedly kill again. Also, I have Night Terrors.” So beautiful women never stop throwing themselves at him, both in the form of a hot-to-trot hairstylist as well as the film’s female lead, Nina Franklin (Barbara Hershey), who is attracted to his wounded, bad boy quality, to the sense that he is the real deal, an actual soldier who has experienced death and killing and the insanity of war and consequently sees them all very differently from actors and artisans for whom this is all just work.
In an all-time great performance, O’Toole plays Cross as a man of great power and zero responsibility, a predatory figure of satanic evil who hovers above the action on a crane or in a helicopter, looking down on the foolish mortals in his midst, the pawns at his disposal, literally and metaphorically.
To be a true auteur, and we can tell that Eli is a true auteur because of his insanity and evil, is to be a cross between God and the devil. One minute you are bringing back a stuntman from the dead, albeit with some trickery and sleight of hand. The next you’re doing everything in your power to ensure that he joins his colleague in Stuntman Heaven or, given the nature of the film’s scoundrels, Stuntman Hell.
In The Stunt Man, Eli is Jesus. But he is also Lucifer, tempting Railsback’s bleached-blonde Adam with the Apple of money, escape from the relevant authorities and an opportunity for unlikely cinematic immortality pulling off a stunt so perilous and dangerous that it threatens to transform his magnum opus into the world’s most expensive snuff film.
Perched like a vulture or Praying Mantis, Cross is a Falstaffian figure of infinite guile and cynical calculation who sees in Cameron someone whose small, expendable life and body he can control and use to his own wicked ends, up to, and including, killing him if that’s what the movie demands.
The Stunt Man’s milieu provides the perfect pretext for gorgeously choreographed, staged and executed action set-pieces filmed in virtuoso long shots by cinematographer Mario Tosi that painstakingly deconstruct the filmmaking process, breaking it down to its disparate components, in sequences that double as peerless showcases for stuntmen.
That these intricate shots were undoubtedly accomplished using the very same cranes and helicopters Eli lounges so malevolently from is just one of myriad ways the film’s reality and fantasy overlap and blur to the point of being impossible to tell apart.
Yes, giving Railsback a cameo in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood would have been a wonderful tip of the hat to his richly merited cult infamy as Charles Manson and riveting turn in The Stunt Man from a filmmaker with, if anything, a crazily over-developed appreciation for Hollywood history and its many weird nooks and crannies and cult stars.
Hopefully the Manson and stunt double themes in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will at the very least encourage more people to check out The Stunt Man, which is at once one of the darkest, most cynical and despairing films ever made about the moviemaking and a timeless classic overflowing with bona fide, non-ironic movie magic.
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