How ‘The Stunt Man’ and ‘Hooper’ Set The Standard For ‘The Fall Guy’ (The TV Show And The Movie)

Given that The Fall Guy lead actors Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt and director David Leitch were toddlers when the television series of the same name debuted in 1981 (okay, Leitch was near kindergarten age), it’s not surprising that, winking (and genuinely cute) end-credits cameos notwithstanding, the movie itself, despite its origins, isn’t pitched as a nostalgia trip for the current Consumer Cellular clients who were fans of the original show. 

No, it’s a contemporary action movie with a (in this viewer’s estimation) labored romantic narrative shoehorned into it. And, as its publicity has repeated, a love letter to the men and women who risk their analog necks to thrill us at the movies. It has a slew of action set pieces that dare you to distinguish Gosling himself from the actual daredevils who double him. The mayhem — arising as Colt, Gosling’s character, is first trying to solve the “disappearance” of the hideous egomaniac star he usually doubles, and then being framed for a murder — is jaw-dropping and “unbelievable” even as the movie purports to lay bare the secrets behind the art of crashing a car without breaking your back/neck/entire life. 

The aforementioned impulse to pay tribute to stuntmen was strong in both star Burt Reynolds and director Hal Needham when they made a picture called Hooper in 1978. After establishing his Serious Actor bona fides with 1972’s Deliverance, Reynolds, whose roots were in television and non-Eastwood Spaghetti Westerns, tended largely toward populist fare. Needham, an expert stunt driver and double, had worked with the star for some time. The duo hit pay dirt with Needham’s 1977 directorial debut Smokey and the Bandit, the acme of speeding car and highway pileup pictures, a truly delightful grindhouse lark elevated by studio polish, with a nifty runaway bride romance that highlighted Reynolds chemistry with bona fide Serious Actor and then-Reynolds galpal (as the parlance of the day put it) Sally Field. 

Smokey was purposefully insubstantial, to be sure; for Hooper, Reynolds and Needham wanted something a little more real. And they got it, delivering genuinely illuminating character detail with incredible stunt feats in a supremely tight 99 minute package. Reynolds’ title character, a stunt man turned stunt coordinator who still does a lot of the grunt work on his own, is beginning to feel his age — as is the case with most real-life stuntmen, he’s got aches and pains and maybe improperly healed broken bones, but still loves the game. Kinda. Field plays Gwen Doyle, his partner, whose dad, Jocko (the great Brian Keith), is an old-school stunt guy who was something of a mentor to Hooper. The character is based on Jock Mahoney, a stunt guy who played Tarzan in the 1960s, and who was married to Field’s mom in the 1950s. (In the contemporary publicity for the film Mahoney was referred to with fondness, but in Field’s 2018 memoir In Pieces, she revealed that she was sexually abused by her stepdad up to the age of 14.) Rounding out the cast are Jan-Michael Vincent as a hot-dogging newbie to the stunt world and comedian Robert Klein as an impossibly pretentious and cowardly director who some have said was modeled after Peter Bogdanovich, with whom Reynolds had worked with on At Long Last Love and Nickelodeon in the early ‘70s. 

Like stuntman-turned-director Leitch, Needham, Reynolds and even Field were, as we see, well-versed in the territory. The movie begins with a serio-comic montage of Hooper getting into gear — padding, protective bandages, the works — accompanied by faux-matador music. Reynolds brings his Serious Actor chops to bear on a lot of the material — when he asks a colleague if he’s got any “percs,” you believe he’s in pain. Reynolds and Field’s chemistry here is on the laid-back side but still generating sparks. Adam West plays himself. There’s even a Tammy Wynette song. This is the definition of a “What’s not to like?” movie, really. And the sense of camaraderie among professionals who risk their lives daily is Hawksian in a way that the aforementioned Bogdanovich often himself aspired to. (That’s as in Howard Hawks, in a mode defined by his mail-plane-pilot drama/adventure Only Angels Have Wings.)

Lee Majors, who would star in the very Hooper-influenced The Fall Guy series, was seen by some as a Burt Reynolds wannabe. But in an illuminating irony, it was Majors who, in the early 1960s, beat Burt Reynolds, one of 400 other actors who auditioned, for a central role in the Western TV series The Big Valley. A series whose popularity put Majors in a straitjacket that prevented him from ever really getting into the film arena. The Fall Guy was a follow-up to the most popular Majors series, The Six Million Dollar Man, a rather silly sci-fi adventure enterprise that successfully resisted any credible film adaptation. 

The Fall Guy, the series, was amiable and lightweight, and took most of its cues from Hooper. But The Fall Guy, the movie, seems to take a couple of plot points from 1980’s The Stunt Man, a quirky cult picture directed by Richard Rush (Freebie and the Bean, Psych-Out, and, holy moley, The Color Of Night) from a novel by Paul Brodeur (the New Yorker science writer who, among other things, blew the lid off how bad asbestos was/is). The magnificent Steve Railsback, who made a specialty out of playing Very Anxious Men in this period (see also Lifeforce, and I really mean see it), is Cameron, a Nam vet on the run from the cops (his law breaking turns out to be predicated on circumstances we can all understand if not necessarily relate to) who stumbles upon a film shoot on the California coast and is adopted by imperious, mercurial and super devious director Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole, mischievous and larger than life in a performance he said he partly patterned after his Lawrence of Arabia director David Lean). At one point he calls Cameron “a ridiculous daredevil with a head filled with cement” after more or less blackmailing him into taking on the stunt man role.

As in The Fall Guy, there’s a missing stunt man that Railsback’s Cameron is asked to substitute for. As in The Fall Guy — well, and in Hooper as well — there’s a big car stunt at the end. (The Fall Guy one-ups both movies by making it a car AND helicopter stunt.) This movie is definitely the most highbrow of the lot, with a whole lot of “what is reality” material enlivening the proceedings. A little old lady observed by Cameron on the film set turns out to be the gorgeous Barbara Hershey, as Nina, Cameron’s subsequent love interest, when she peels off her makeup as Cameron rescues her from nearly drowning. The movie’s a metaphysical comedy of errors that, among other things, revels in metaphor, positing the Film Director as an existential ring master in the circus of life, that sort of thing. (A notion bolstered by the unusually jaunty score by Dominic Frontiere.) The movie suffered from severe distribution woes on its 1980 nearly-non-release, but critical acclaim buoyed it to the point that it earned three Oscar nominations, for Rush, O’Toole, and Rush and Lawrence Marcus for adapted screenplay. Both the Needham and Rush films offer diverse delights that make an apt double feature — despite the thematic similarities, there’s absolutely no redundancy in the two pictures. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the upcoming The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for pre-order.