It's no surprise that director Richard Rush took a decade to make THE STUNT MAN since it adheres to his early creatively-maneuvered camerawork, that makes every scene matter and every moment count... in this case a Hollywood satire starring Peter O'Toole as a flamboyant, borderline psychotic director who desperately hires a Vietnam-vet criminal as his wartime potboiler's titular STUNT MAN...
Herein second-billed Steve Railsback is the true lead, which is good and bad since, during the more dramatic, expository sequences mostly involving vulnerable ingenue Barbara Hershey, he still bares campy residual from the Charles Manson biopic HELTER SKELTER, and is more naturally-suited to intense action sequences, either by his character Cameron, initially chased by cops in a fast-paced prologue -- or taking-on the spontaneous STUNT MAN gig...
And while the sometimes too-zany-to-seem-real film-within-a-film's directed by O'Toole as egotistical tyrant Eli Cross, it's coordinated by scene-stealer and Rush's collaborating stuntman Charles Bail as Chuck, teaching the ropes... from a fake fall to dangerously leaping from rooftops... yet only returning sporadically to give advice -- at which point Railsback's Cameron is already knee deep in on-set problems, ignited by the illegal guise of becoming the actual stuntman who died on a bridge while he was being chased across it...
Which is the plot moving both THE STUNT MAN film and its central character forward, yet is overwhelmed by either the annoyingly intrusive 1930's-era flapper-comedy score or bogged-down by perpetually bickering melodramas between cast and crew, needing more activity, as in perpetual on-screen movement that auteur Richard Rush -- from 1960's counterculture flicks involving either brooding teachers or vicious bikers -- was a genuine master of.
Herein second-billed Steve Railsback is the true lead, which is good and bad since, during the more dramatic, expository sequences mostly involving vulnerable ingenue Barbara Hershey, he still bares campy residual from the Charles Manson biopic HELTER SKELTER, and is more naturally-suited to intense action sequences, either by his character Cameron, initially chased by cops in a fast-paced prologue -- or taking-on the spontaneous STUNT MAN gig...
And while the sometimes too-zany-to-seem-real film-within-a-film's directed by O'Toole as egotistical tyrant Eli Cross, it's coordinated by scene-stealer and Rush's collaborating stuntman Charles Bail as Chuck, teaching the ropes... from a fake fall to dangerously leaping from rooftops... yet only returning sporadically to give advice -- at which point Railsback's Cameron is already knee deep in on-set problems, ignited by the illegal guise of becoming the actual stuntman who died on a bridge while he was being chased across it...
Which is the plot moving both THE STUNT MAN film and its central character forward, yet is overwhelmed by either the annoyingly intrusive 1930's-era flapper-comedy score or bogged-down by perpetually bickering melodramas between cast and crew, needing more activity, as in perpetual on-screen movement that auteur Richard Rush -- from 1960's counterculture flicks involving either brooding teachers or vicious bikers -- was a genuine master of.