Scribblings › The Stunt Man

As a paranoid brainiac teenager, I was obsessed with the notion that I would fail my middle school and high school finals. Each spring, I would bunker up in my suburban bedroom, poring over my spiral-bound notebooks and memorizing answers to the Study Questions printed at the end of every chapter in my brown paper-covered science and social studies texts.

For all my self-righteous devotion to straight A's, the best moment of this annual week-long nerdfest was always a friendly rap at my door.

"How about taking a break?" my father would suggest, sticking his head in. "Let's catch a movie."

Bliss, relief, escape from myself. And with parental approval to boot.

I suspect that my memory's star system has given most of the films I saw with Dad on these occasions higher rankings than they deserve on purely artistic merit. Rae Dawn Chong inventing the missionary position as a muddy cave babe in Quest for Fire can't possibly have been the great cinematic moment it felt like after hours of algebraic proofs.

But there was one masterpiece amidst the study breaks. In 1980, my father took me to see The Stunt Man. This maniacally funny, whiplash-paced action movie offered a much-needed life lesson: intelligence and great fun are not mutually exclusive concepts.

The story of a paranoid Vietnam vet who stumbles onto the set of a World War I movie while fleeing the police, The Stunt Man manages to work compelling ideas about identity, control and chaos vs. order into a whizbang story packed with laughs, raunchy innuendo and kangaroo cookies.

Peter O'Toole is at his fey, brilliant best as megalomaniacal director Eli Cross, who swoops out of the sky on camera cranes and poses in front of a helicopter so its rotors whirl like a halo behind his self-deified head. While O'Toole was rightly nominated for a Best Actor Oscar (as was Richard Rush, for both direction and screenplay), the entire cast is quirkily superb: Steve Railsback as the fugitive Cameron, Barbara Hershey as a shifty, sexy starlet, and supporting actors Alex Rocco, Philip Bruns and Allen Goorwitz as a charismatic town sheriff, an indefatigable production manager and a lovable dumpling screenwriter.

Dominic Frontiere's propulsive soundtrack is so hummably catchy that it found an afterlife where it was likely heard by many more people than have ever seen The Stunt Man: for years, the film's main theme was used as the introductory and station break music for WPVI-TV's 11:30 p.m. "Million Dollar Movie" here in Philadelphia.

As much as I relished my big screen escapes from adolescent academia, even The Stunt Man didn't entirely alter my obsessive geekdom. Years later, I revisited the movie in seven painstaking stop-and-start VCR viewings; it was the subject of my thesis for a college film course.