The Stunt Man

Year: 1980

Country: USA

Tagline: "If God could do the things that we can do, he'd be a happy man . . ."  »

Plot: Cameron (Steve Railsback), a Vietnam vet who's wanted for attempted murder, is caught by the police but escapes. Crossing a bridge, he dodges an antique car that seems to be trying to run him down; when he turns around, the car has disappeared. While he wonders whether it went into the river, a helicopter flies close to the bridge and a man inside looks intently at Cameron. Later, Cameron is attracted to a movie shoot -- a World War I battle scene -- on the beach. After the scene, he notices an old woman who walks through the set greeting the actors, then falls in the water. Cameron dives in to rescue her and is horrified when she pulls off her face -- a mask. She's not an old woman, but the movie's leading lady, Nina Franklin (Barbara Hershey), testing the costume and make-up for the scenes set late in her character's life.The director, Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole), descends from the sky on his camera crane. This is his second entrance from on high; Eli is the same man who stared at Cameron from the helicopter. He offers Cameron a job, explaining that their last stunt man just ran a car off a bridge. They haven't found the body, and Eli can't afford the production delays that will result if the police get involved. The local police chief is aware of the accident on the bridge and Eli has to do some fast talking to convince him that Cameron is Burt, the stunt man who went off the bridge into the river. (Eli claims divers pulled him out of the car, and Cameron is convincingly damp, having just pulled Nina out of the ocean.) Cameron's job is to pretend to be Burt and do his stunts -- a role within a role that allows both Eli and Cameron to avoid entanglements with the police.Cameron is rechristened "Lucky." Denise (Sharon Farrell), the film's hair stylist, dyes his hair and makes a pass at him. Ostensibly the color change is to make him resemble the blond leading man, Raymond Bailey (Adam Roarke) -- Lucky is Ray's stunt double -- but of course it also, conveniently, makes him harder to recognize. There's a running theme about how the movies are all about making things look like what they're not. When Cameron is convinced Eli's selling him out by showing the cops the film shot when Burt ran off the bridge -- because Cameron's in it -- Eli reassures him by telling him that the original King Kong from the 1933 movie "was just 3 foot 6 inches tall -- he only came up to Fay Wray's belly button. If God could do the tricks that we can do, he'd be a happy man." "How tall was King Kong?" becomes their catchphrase.Lucky learns stunt work under the tutelage of Chuck (Charles Bail), the stunt coordinator; there's some cool detail about how stunts are pulled off. (To film part of the wing-walking scene, they tether the plane to the ground and fly in circles at an altitude of about 6 feet.) There's an elaborate scene where Lucky, standing in for the leading man, is chased up and down the sloping red roofs of a large building (in real life, the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, California), shot at, and falls through a skylight into a bordello. Lucky is thrilled to learn he'll be paid $600 for the scene. At the same time, Lucky/Cameron's getting involved with Nina -- who, it turns out, once had a romance with Eli and still admires him tremendously. Eli admits to her that he's jealous of Lucky.The last shoot at the current location involves Lucky's most difficult stunt, driving a Duesenberg off a bridge and escaping under water -- the same scene Burt was shooting when he died. Lucky believes Eli is trying to kill him, and will use the stunt to make it look like an accident. It's plausible; killing Lucky would get him out of Nina's life and remove the most unreliable witness to the cover-up of Burt's death.In the wee hours of the morning before the shoot, Lucky and Nina have a heart-to-heart in the set shop and Lucky finally tells his story. He'd planned to open an ice cream shop with a friend when he got home from Vietnam, but the friend backed out -- he didn't want Cameron around because, Cameron realized, the friend was the guy Cameron's girlfriend had left him for. Cameron took out his fury one night on the ice cream shop (which he reenacts by trashing the set shop). When a cop turned up to see what was going on, Cameron threw a big tub of ice cream at him and fled. The cop was knocked out and spent several hours with his head in the ice cream, which didn't kill him but resulted in frostbite damage to his nose and ear and an attempted murder charge for Cameron, who's been on the run ever since. After Nina stops laughing, the couple plans to escape together: Nina hides in the trunk of the stunt car, which Cameron will drive away in the morning instead of driving off the bridge.Unbeknownst to Lucky, Chuck has planted an explosive in one of the Duesenberg's front tires to make the car's tumble off the bridge look more realistic. Lucky panics everyone by starting the scene too early. (He's in the Duesenberg with the windows rolled up and mistakes a question about the on-board camera for his cue.) The car goes into the water when Chuck triggers the exploding tire, and Lucky scrambles to reach Nina in the trunk -- until he happens to look up out of the sinking car's rear window to see Nina with Eli on the bridge. Lucky emerges, gasping, from the river and notices that there were divers in the water with him all the time. Nina tells him that she was found in the trunk hours before the shoot, and Eli told her that Lucky had changed his mind and decided to do the stunt. Lucky, of course, had done no such thing, but Nina's so pleased that he and Eli have made up that he doesn't set her straight. Eli, descending as usual from heaven on his crane, explains that he wouldn't let Lucky run off thinking that Eli was trying to kill him (and not incidentally leaving the film incomplete). The best way to convince Lucky of Eli's good will, Eli felt, was to make sure Lucky got through the stunt in one piece. Lucky, though furious -- not for the first time -- at Eli's high-handed manipulations, is amused in spite of himself and giddy with relief at surviving. As the movie ends, Cameron and Eli are bickering over Cameron's pay for the stunt and planning to catch a plane to the production's next location.On the run from the police, Cameron (Steve Railsback) crashes the set of a Hollywood war movie just when they need a new stunt man. Cameron takes the job as a way to hide out, and falls for the leading lady.

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