Richard Rush’s cult 1980 comedy-drama turns film-making into a battlefield, with O’Toole’s imperious director blurring art, war and cruelty in a performance of lasting menace
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ichard Rush’s 1980 comedy was always one of the most distinctive items in Peter O’Toole’s filmography, a witty performance as an autocratic movie director that earned him one of his many (unconverted) Oscar nominations. After 46 years, The Stunt Man looks in some ways like a B-side to Lawrence of Arabia, about a possibly, definitely crazy person whose innate gift for leadership is going to endanger the troops much more than himself.
It’s a high-concept satire of … what, exactly? Of the movie business with all its hubris and conceit? Yes, it’s perhaps also an anti-war satire – although it’s more a satire of cinema’s inability to be anti-war when the movies have a vested interest in making war look exciting. But the black comedy and the raucousness are interleaved with weird, fierce stabs of extended seriousness and even anguish.
O’Toole plays Eli, the imperious director in charge of a spectacular first world war action drama with exploding planes and the like, megalomaniacally swooping around in his helicopter and sometimes perched on the camera crane from which he will descend, godlike, to issue orders and vinegary putdowns. He is over budget, over schedule and overstretched; reckless, irresponsible, cutting corners on safety.
