The Stunt Man

Day for Night has an unsettled underside, a bit of Wellesian "hanky-panky and sidearm snookery" brings it to the fore. Speed is key to the virtuosity, the opening whizzes by as a daisy-chain of gags: Pooch-buzzard-whirlybird-apple like swirling integers pointing to the scruffy fugitive (Steve Railsback) by the pinball machine, "one more chance to lose." He keeps running until he falls right into somebody's mise en scène, a movie set is a good place to hide and feed your paranoia. Eli the Terrible (Peter O'Toole) lords over the production, crowned by helicopter blades in a low-angle view and improvising a scenario to turn the shell-shocked intruder into a replacement for the drowned stunt man. The patsy wants to stay alive, meanwhile the visionary aims for "an authentic stench of madness behind all that good, clean fun." Richard Rush on the reality-vs.-illusion game makes for a beautifully malevolent carnival, a coruscating camera that keeps its meta-layers continuously dancing. True daredevils are required and there's Chuck Bail himself conducting a master class onscreen. The leading lady (Barbara Hershey) materializes beneath latex wrinkles and reveals herself amid sea-foam ("I am the movies"), her tears are achieved via the calculated cruelties that are the director's arsenal. Fake blood and real bullets, piglets in the pram and the tilted widescreen of a sinking car's windshield, the screenwriter's (Allen Garfield) flash of inspiration with a naughty bronze contraption. O'Toole's glorious caricature of David Lean anchors it all—a magus on the floating throne of the camera crane, a wicked send-up of the divine-auteur image at the very end of the Movie-Brat decade. "Ruins the realism, don't you think?" Reisz labors with the discoveries the following year in The French Lieutenant's Woman, Rush is happy to let them dissipate into pink smoke. With Sharon Farrell, Alex Rocco, Adam Roarke, and John Garwood.