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
Richard 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.
