We just rented the 2004 Dawn of the Dead, and my husband and I think that a stunt right at the beginning was really cool. It’s when Ana’s fleeing into the bathroom, and runs backwards into the side of the tub, causing her to fall into it. It’s just a simple little thing - not someone dangling from a helicopter or falling off a building - but I imagine it must be really hard to do that. It looks completely realistic, like she didn’t know she was going to take a tub edge in the backs of her knees at all. And on top of it all, the director says in the commentary that the stunt woman did it on the first take!
That made me think of another, not-so-fancy stunt that I quite like. In Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy, the prison warden gets the scarab in his brain, and runs full-tilt, head-on into a stone wall. It looks totally brilliant. The way they did it, IIRC, was the stunt man was tied to a line that brought him up just short of the wall. Very cool.
Even though I know how it was done, the Lillian Gish & Richard Barthelmess ice-floe sequence from Way Down East (1921) never fails to have me peeping nervously from behind my fingers.
You bring up something that I’ve noticed, too. The little simple things can look so unrealistic, pushing you out of the movie moment into “Oh, they’re acting.” I’v noticed this with:
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[li]A simple trip, as over a root or something. For instance, the hero and heroine are running for their lives from the bad guy’s pack of dogs, and the heroine trips over . . . something. Actually, she doesn’t trip, she just decides to fall down.[/li][li]Restraining someone. For instance, the bad guy makes a crack about the protagonist’s girl friend. The protagonist goes after the bad guy. The protagonist’s friend’s hold him back. How hard are they really trying? It looks like one good lunge would break their grip.[/li][li]And my pet peeve: the fake sneeze. C’mon, who really says “Ah choo!” when they sneeze?[/li][/ul]
Sorry for the hijack. Maybe I’m proud of one my few talents: my fake sneeze can fool anybody.
I love an outrageous stunt, so I will watch Jackie Chan’s work anytime I get the chance. A favorite is him fighting while standing in an aluminum ladder.
I was coming in to mention Jackie Chan. Look at Rumble in the Bronx, especially when he jumps from one building to another. During the closing credits they show the unedited footage. Jackie looks surprised to still be alive.
Naw, the best stunt was in The Twilight Zone movie, where the director told the helicopter stunt pilot to fly down a canyon, but neglected to tell him that he was going to detonate some high explosives along the canyon walls, which caused the pilot to lose control and kill one of the onlookers.
I don’t know the name of the film, but it involves Buster Keaton standing with his feet on two moving trains, one foot on each train. the trains are moving parallel but it still doesn’t look easy. Now imagine that there are light poles and sign posts between the two sets of tracks. So every few seconds, Buster has to go on one foot to dodge a pole or sign as it flashes past. It looked extremely dangerous, especially considering the lack of FX in the silent film era.
Buster Keaton’s cross tie stunt from The General (1927) always amazes me. (While sitting on the cow catcher of a moving locomotive, he knocks one tie off the tracks by throwing anothing tie at it.) It’s all the more remarkable in that what you see is exactly what happened, and that if it hadn’t worked, Keaton could well have been killed.
In the first Terminator film, there is a tiny, one second long, stunt that is just great. It’s when Reese first appears. He falls naked onto a cement floor.
The impressive thing is, is that the stuntman did it completely for real. He fell about six feet onto solid cement. No padding, no camera tricks, just a whole lot of hurt. Ouch!
Most of Keaton’s stunts in that film are amazing. More subtle, but just as impressive, is when he sits on the driving rod (I think that’s what it’s call) attached to the wheel the train goes into the station. The engineer refused to let him do it: the wheel has a tendency to spin, which would have thrown Keaton off and maybe gotten him killed. Keaton was the boss, though, so they went through with it.
I don’t know if this is technically a stunt, but Donald O’Connor’s sommersalts off the walls (and through them) in the “Be a Clown” number of Singin’ in the Rain are amazing.
I agree with many of the choices here, especially from the silent era. Buster Keaton was a genius. Jackie Chan pulls off the most audacious stunts in cinema, and the fact that he’s still doing at whatever his age is now is amazing.
Coming up to date a little, the Bond movie in which the stunt man skis off the edge of a very high cliff, jettisons his skis, pulls the ripcord and opens a Union Jack parachute must rate as one of the greatest and most satisfying he-did-it-for-real stunts ever filmed. It’s a great curtain-raiser for the movie, and the way the Bond theme kicks in when we see the parachute is cinema gold. And I don’t even like Bond movies much (but the tank chase sequence in GoldenEye was good).
Jeez tracer, are you trying to make some abstruse satirical comment on Hollywood, or are you just being a jerk?
Anyway . . .
I love Jackie Chan. It makes me a little sad that he’s abandoned his “I’m really doing all this” schtick recently (although I understand - I’ll probably be lucky if I can jog on a treadmill at his age).
I see I also need to delve into some older films - thank Og for Netflix!
