5 Movies | Tuesday, April 12
While some stars relish doing things like skydiving from a motorcycle jettisoned off a huge cliff, most prefer to let the most dangerous work be handled by highly skilled professionals. Stunt performers have been working in the industry since the early days. For most of Hollywood history they remained uncredited, but thanks to motion pictures’ affinity for action sequences, it’s impossible to imagine movie production without the fearless women and men who not only pull off the most daring feats (often in unwieldy costumes and wigs to double for actors) but also introduce new methods and technologies that make the stunts both safer and more believable.
Silent comics most often did their own stunts. While actors like Buster Keaton frequently took incredible risks to get shots that achieved gasps as much as laughter, others occasionally had to depend on stunt performers. Case in point: Harold Lloyd, whose Safety Last! (1923) was one of the first productions to carefully think through and pre-plan how it would achieve its daredevil thrills.
In this picture, Lloyd plays a country bumpkin hoping for big city success, agreeing to scale a tall department store building as a money-making PR move. Lloyd was no slouch when it came to doing his own stunts, and it’s further to his credit that he tackled these tricks despite having lost his right-hand thumb, index finger and half of his palm in an accident a few years earlier. That really is him hanging from the clock in one of Hollywood’s most iconic images, although there was substantial cinematic sleight-of-hand involved in making it look like he was hanging hundreds of feet above the streets of Los Angeles. The sequence was inspired by an actual stunt by “Human Spider” Bill Strother, who is credited for acting in this picture but not for the stunt work he did. Another uncredited performer, Harvey Parry, doubled for Lloyd in long shots of the building climb. Although he did stunt work on 175 films between 1914 and 1986, Parry didn’t receive screen credit until Escape from New York (1981), when he was 80 years old!
John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) features legendary work by perhaps the most famous and prolific stuntman in movies, Yakima Canutt. A former rodeo star, Canutt did most of his stunt work in dozens of movies over the course of 60 years, almost entirely unacknowledged
until he started receiving screen credit as a stunt coordinator later in his career. In Ford’s western, Canutt pulled off one of the most memorable action sequences ever – jumping from a horse onto a team of six galloping stagecoach horses, falling to the ground after he is “shot” by star John Wayne, then having the team and coach speed over him as he lies on the ground. Canutt was finally recognized with an Honorary Oscar in 1967 for his on-screen work and development of safety devices used in productions.
By the time the crime drama The Seven-Ups was released in 1973, stunt people were finally starting to get their due, although not all of them on this film were credited either. One performer who was acknowledged, as stunt coordinator, was Bill Hickman. Producer Philip D’Antoni first hired Hickman as a stunt driver for the famous San Francisco chase scene in Bullitt (1968). A few years later, Hickman was a driver, double for Gene Hackman and coordinator of another iconic chase scene, this time through New York, on D’Antoni’s production of The French Connection (1971). The two worked together one last time on The Seven-Ups, for which Hickman coordinated and drove another chase. Hickman said the scene’s violent end, when the main character plows into the back of a parked semi, shearing off the top of his car, was a tribute to Jayne Mansfield’s death in a similar accident.
For years, a rumor has persisted that a stuntman died during the filming of the chariot race in Ben-Hur (1959). Not so, although the mix-up may be attributable to a story told by Francis X. Bushman, one of the stars of the original 1925 version, who described how a wheel came off a chariot rounding a curve, throwing its driver high up into the air and causing fatal internal injuries when he landed on a pile of lumber. The race in the later version was more carefully planned over the course of a year and directed by Yakima Canutt and Andrew Marton. They wrote nearly 40 pages of script outlining every minute aspect of the sequence. After the arena was built – the largest set constructed for a movie up to that time – the race was filmed, taking a total of five weeks over a period of three months. The details of that production would fill a book or long documentary and too much to recount here, but one notable stunt incident may have given rise to the death rumor.
Canutt’s sons had followed their father into the business and worked on this film, with Joe Canutt handling most of star Charlton Heston’s more dangerous work (although Heston and co-star Stephen Boyd did have to spend several weeks learning how to drive the chariots, and Boyd did most of his riskiest stunts). In a shot of Ben-Hur’s chariot being thrown upward when it crosses the wreckage of another chariot, the younger Canutt was unintentionally thrown up into the air, sustaining a minor chin injury when he landed. That shot was coupled with a close-up of Heston climbing back in to give the impression that the character had been able to cling to the front of his chariot without landing on the track and being trampled.
The Lost Squadron (1932) contains some of the best aviation sequences of its time, thanks to lead stunt piloting by the film’s co-scripter, Dick Grace, from his original story about three air aces who make their living after World War I as Hollywood stunt flyers. Producer David O. Selznick and director George Archainbaud employed several other famous stunt flyers of the time – Frank Clarke, Art Goebel, Leo Nomis, in addition to Grace – piloting war surplus aircraft and, true to the film’s pre-release publicity, “courting death…plunging, zooming, climbing, crashing that a madman below might create on film the supreme thrill…” The madman in this case doesn’t refer to Archainbaud but to Erich von Stroheim, parodying his own autocratic image playing the movie-within-a-movie’s dictatorial director.
