The Omen – Blood and Porridge

July 22, 2023

People who stunted my development

© The Mirisch Company / United Artists

I read recently that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – better and less grandiosely known as the folk who dole out the Oscars every year – are currently considering creating a new Oscar that will honour the work of the movie industry’s stunt performers. A yearly award for the film featuring the best stunt-work looks a real possibility thanks to the efforts of Chad Stahelski, director of the John Wick series (2014-23). He commented last month, “We’ve been meeting with members of the Academy and actually having these conversations… Everybody on both sides wants this to happen. They want stunts at the Oscars. It’s going to happen.”

Also creating a buzz lately about stunt-work – proper, practical stunts carried out by real people, as opposed to artificial action-sequences created with cartoony, shit-looking Computer-Generated Imagery – has been the trailer for the new Mission Impossible movie. This is framed by a stunt involving the world’s most famous scientologist in which he deliberately barrels off a very high cliff. The last person to do this so spectacularly was Roger Moore – or more accurately, stuntman Rick Sylvester – in the pre-credits sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me (1978).

Anyway, now seems an opportune time to dust down and repost this piece about my favourite practitioners of the art of stunt-work, which originally saw the light of day in 2018.

In my boyhood, there were no personal computers, video games or Internet to keep me inside the house. For amusement, I had to go outside and play in a variety of locations that, thinking about it now, were a wee bit dangerous – at roadsides and riversides, in derelict buildings and old sheds, and on any roof or in any treetop I managed to climb up to. I suppose many kids in the 1970s played in places like those, but I had an advantage. I lived on a farm, which was full of machinery sheds, hay-sheds, grain stores, slurry pits, silage pits, workshops and outhouses. It was also right next to a river and a busy road. Perhaps it was this potential for injury and death in my play-area that prompted me, like most pre-pubescent males in the 1970s, to resolve that when I grew up I was going to be a film stuntman.

Accordingly, when I went fishing one day at the age of nine and fell off the riverbank, into the river, the way I recounted the mishap to my school-mates later made it sound like how Paul Newman and Robert Redford had famously jumped off the cliff and into the river in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). This feat of derring-do had actually been performed by the stuntmen Howard Curtis and Micky Gilbert. To be honest, the bank I fell off was only two feet above the water, and the water itself was only three feet deep, but in situations like these you’re allowed to use your imagination.

In fact, I became much less enamoured with action-movie stars when it occurred to me that, most of the time, they didn’t perform the breath-taking stunts featured in their films. Those were done by unsung stuntmen and stuntwomen, who therefore were the people I should admire. If I’d been on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, with my autograph book, I think I would have ignored Harrison Ford and made a beeline instead for stuntmen Vic Armstrong and the late Terry Richards. And that’s a big reason why I despise the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day, which made heavy use of CGI during its action scenes. It seemed a betrayal of all the stunt-work that’d distinguished the Bond movies during their previous 40-year history and an insult to all the people who’d contributed to that stunt-work. (By my count, Armstrong and Richards both worked on six official Bond movies, and each had one ‘rogue’ 007 production to their names too – Armstrong with 1983’s Never Say Never Again, Richards with 1967’s Casino Royale.)

Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favourite stunt performers throughout history….

© Walter Wanger Productions / United Artists

Born to a US ranching family in 1895, Yakima Canutt became a world-champion rodeo rider and by 1923 was involved in the fledgling motion-picture industry, inevitably playing cowboys in westerns. However, he’d had his voice ravaged by flu during a two-year stint with the US Navy and he realised he couldn’t continue as an actor when silent films gave way to the talkies, and so he started to specialise in stunt-work. Canutt ended up as stunt double for John Wayne, who claimed to have got many of his famous cowboy mannerisms – the strut, the drawl – from him. As a cowboy, after all, Canutt was the real deal.

His most famous stunt is one he performed in 1939’s Stagecoach, in which he leaps onto a team of horses pulling the titular stagecoach, falls between them, gets dragged along and then disappears under the stagecoach itself. This inspired the sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones is dragged beneath a German truck. Canutt later became a second-unit director and staged the chariot race in 1959’s Ben Hur. And despite sustaining injuries that required plastic surgery on at least two occasions, he lived to the ripe old age of 90.

Bud Ekins was a champion motorcyclist as well as a stuntman. It was he – not Steve McQueen, as was believed for a long time – who rode the Triumph TR6 Trophy motorbike near the end of 1963’s The Great Escape, when McQueen’s character, pursued by half the German army, attempts to leap the giant fence that separates him from Switzerland. (The famously petrol-headed McQueen did ride the motorbike during the preceding chase and was keen to perform the jump himself, but the filmmakers talked him out of it.) That alone earns Ekins a place in my Stuntmen Hall of Fame, but he went on to do lots of other cool stuff. He worked with McQueen again in Bullitt (1968), driving that film’s iconic Ford Mustang 390 GT, and he was also involved in Diamonds are Forever (1970), Race with the Devil (1975), Sorcerer (1977) and The Blues Brothers (1980).

Every time I’m on board a cable car and spot another cable car approaching from the opposite direction, I wonder if I’ll see Alf Joint perform a suicidal leap from the roof of one car onto the roof of the other – for Joint was the stuntman who doubled for Richard Burton in 1967’s Where Eagles Dare when Burton’s character had to hop cable cars close to the fearsome Schloss Adler, the mountaintop stronghold of the SS. Like many a great British stuntman, Joint’s CV is a roll-call of Bond movies (he made two), Star Wars movies (one) and Superman movies (three). He doubled for Eric Porter, playing Professor Moriarty in the acclaimed 1980s TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, when the character plunged to his doom at the Reichenbach Falls; and for Lee Remick in The Omen (1976), presumably during the sequence when Remick is pushed out of a hospital window and crashes through the roof of an ambulance passing below.

© Winkast Film Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

I also remember Joint performing a memorable stunt during the adverts for Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates, which ran on TV from 1968 to 2003 (though I hear they were revived a few years ago). These featured the Milk Tray man, a Bondian character who kept risking life and limb in order to deliver boxes of the chocolates to a beautiful lady, with the tagline being: “And all because… the lady loves Milk Tray.” I can’t recall if it was the same lady receiving all the chocolates in all the adverts – if it was, the poor woman must have developed type 2 diabetes by 2003. Anyway, Joint did the Milk Tray man’s dive off a vertiginous cliff, into a shark-infested sea, in perhaps the most famous of these adverts in 1972.

Also involved in Where Eagles Dare was Eddie Powell, a stuntman who seemed to divide his time between James Bond movies – he made ten official ones, plus Never Say Never Again – and Hammer Films, where he was a stunt double for Christopher Lee in movies like The Mummy (1959), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) and To the Devil a Daughter (1976). For that last film, he also did a ‘full body burn’ stunt during a scene where satanic forces cause Anthony Valentine to spontaneously combust inside a church. In addition, Hammer gave him a few acting credits, predictably eccentric ones, such as the lumbering, bandaged monster in The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) and the half-man, half-beast Goat of Mendes conjured up at a witches’ sabbat in The Devil Rides Out (1968).

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions

Later in his career, Powell performed stunts as the titular, drooling, acid-blooded, multi-mouthed beastie in Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). For instance, he took part in the first film’s engine-room scene where the alien swoops down on the hapless Harry Dean Stanton.

Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t mention William Hobbs here as he wasn’t exactly a stuntman. He was a fight choreographer, more precisely a sword-fight choreographer, and his work enlivened many a swashbuckler over the years. He directed the swordplay in The Three Musketeers (1973) and Four Musketeers (1974) and presumably had the difficult task of restraining Oliver Reed, who from all accounts threw himself into the movies’ fight scenes with the enthusiasm of a blade-wielding Whirling Dervish. He also worked on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), for which he devised the samurai fights. I generally can’t stand the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production of Flash Gordon, but the sequence where Sam Jones fights Timothy Dalton on a platform while spikes erupt at random points and at random moments through its floor, again overseen by Hobbs, is one of the film’s few good parts. Near the end of his life he was still working, on TV, arranging fights for Game of Thrones (2011-19).

Actually, you can see Hobbs in action in this instalment of the long-running TV show This is Your Life (1955-2007), rehearsing a gruelling-looking swordfight with Christopher Lee just before Eamonn Andrews surprises Lee and shepherds him off to a TV studio for a star-studded retrospective of his career. (I usually found This is Your Life tacky and maudlin, but I thought this one was fascinating because, besides Lee and Hobbs, it corrals such movie legends as Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and the afore-mentioned Oliver Reed together under one roof.)

© Troublemaker Studios / Dimension Films

And now for a lady, the New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who doubled for Lucy Lawless in the Xena: Warrior Princess TV show and for Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies. Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) involved a stunt where a shotgun blast hurled Bell backwards – this did so much damage to her ribs and wrist that she spent months recovering from it. But there were clearly no hard feelings between Bell and Tarantino because for his next movie, 2007’s Death Proof, he cast her as herself. She plays a movie stuntwoman – called Zoe Bell – who turns the tables on Kurt Russell’s car-driving serial killer. Tarantino shares my disdain for CGI and insisted that all the vehicular action seen in Death Proof was the real deal, including a ‘ship’s mast’ stunt where Bell straddles the hood of a speeding Dodge Challenger R/T with only a couple of straps to hang onto. Since then, she’s done more gigs for Tarantino, as a stuntwoman in Inglourious Basterds (2009), as an actress in Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2016), and as both in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Finally, no roundup of my favourite stuntmen would be complete without mention of Vic Armstrong, who’s in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s busiest stunt double. His brother Andy, his wife Wendy, and a half-dozen members of the younger generation of his family all work in the stunt / special-effects business too, which must make the Armstrongs the Corleones of the stunt-world.

As well as seven official and unofficial Bonds, his filmography includes three Indiana Joneses and three Supermen, plus a Rambo, Terminator, Omen, Conan and Mission Impossible. He served not only as Harrison Ford’s stunt double while he played Indiana Jones, but also in Blade Runner (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Frantic (1988) and Patriot Games (1992). Indeed, back in his youth, his resemblance to the star was so striking that Ford once quipped to him, “If you learn to talk, I’m in deep trouble.”

© Titan Books

August 9, 2021

Cinematic heroes 3: David Warner

© Warner Bros.

I’ve just discovered that a few days ago was the 80^th birthday of the film and TV character actor David Warner. In honour of the great man becoming an octogenarian, here’s an updated version of a post I wrote about him eight years ago.

For most actors, becoming typecast is a pain in the neck. The day that the lugubrious-faced, distinctive-voiced David Warner became typecast, as an actor specialising in offbeat roles in offbeat films, often horror, science fiction and fantasy ones, it was actually a pane in the neck.

As Keith Jennings, the photographer who befriends Gregory Peck’s ambassador Richard Thorne in 1976’s The Omen, he is memorably decapitated when a sheet of glass comes crashing off the back of a truck and shears his head from his shoulders. Indeed, though The Omen was choc-a-block with people dying in gruesome freak accidents, and later there were Omen sequels with more freak accidents, and later still there were a half-dozen Final Destination movies following a similar template and serving up many more freak accidents, the cinema has seen very few freak accidents as spectacularly shocking as Warner’s in that 45-year-old movie.

© 20^th Century Fox

The main actors in the big-budget Omen – Peck, Lee Remick, Billie Whitelaw – were names not normally associated with horror movies. Until then, Warner’s name hadn’t been associated with them either. Mancunian by birth, he started acting professionally in 1962 and the following year joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, which led to stage roles in Henry IV Part 1, Henry VI Parts I-III, Julius Caesar, Richard II, The Tempest, Twelfth Night and, in 1965, playing the title role, Hamlet. The earliest films he appeared in were sometimes theatrical in origin too, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Sea Gull, which both appeared in 1968. However, it was in 1966’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment that he made his biggest impression on 1960s movie audiences. In it he plays a working-class artist who’s abandoned by his posh wife, played by Vanessa Redgrave, and goes to unhinged extremes to win her back.

When Warner’s career is discussed, it’s often overlooked that he was once a regular performer with the legendary action-movie director Sam Peckinpah. His association with the hard-drinking, coke-snorting, near-deranged filmmaker started with 1970’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue, in which he played an eccentric preacher who befriends Jason Robards’ titular hero. Peckinpah often boasted, “I can’t direct when I’m sober,” and for the young Warner Hogue must have been quite an initiation into the director’s weird and wonderful ways. When bad weather held up filming, Peckinpah and his crew went on a massive drinking binge and ran up a bar-bill worth thousands and thousands of dollars.

In the next year’s Straw Dogs, Peckinpah’s taboo-busting film set in the English West Country, Warner plays a simpleton who unwittingly kills a girl and then takes refuge in Dustin Hoffman and Susan George’s house with a squad of vigilantes on his trail. In Cross of Iron, Peckinpah’s 1977 war movie about a doomed German platoon on the Russian front, he plays a humane German officer who just wants to get through the war in one piece. In fact, in Cross of Iron, nearly all the Germans, including James Coburn’s gallant corporal and James Mason’s world-weary colonel, are humane types who view war with extreme distaste. What upsets the apple-cart, and eventually gets most of them killed, is the arrival of Maximillian Schell’s glory-hunting Prussian officer. Schell is obsessed with winning an iron cross for himself and isn’t worried about other soldiers dying in the process.

In 1973 Warner made his first appearance in a horror film, the British anthology movie From Beyond the Grave, whose stories were based on the writings of Ronald Chetwyn-Hayes. In the film’s first story, The Gate Crasher, he plays an arrogant prick called Edward Charlton who acquires an old mirror from an antique shop and gets it on the cheap by lying to the shop-owner about the mirror’s likely age. Charlton obviously hasn’t seen many horror films before. Otherwise, he might have thought twice about cheating a proprietor played by Peter Cushing in a shop called Temptations Inc. He gets his just deserts. The mirror turns out to be inhabited by a malevolent spirit, which possesses him and drives him to commit murder.

It was in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Warner got his fondest-remembered roles, starting with the kindly but ill-fated Jennings in The Omen. Then, in 1979’s Time After Time, he switches from being a nice guy to being a bad one, playing John Leslie Stevenson, a Victorian gentleman and friend of the pioneering science-fiction writer H.G. Wells, who’s played by Malcolm McDowell. Unbeknownst to Wells, Stevenson has been making a name for himself by butchering prostitutes in Whitechapel – for he is none other than Jack the Ripper. When Wells unveils his latest invention, a working time machine like the one he would later write about in his famous 1895 novella, Stevenson uses it to escape the closing police net and scoots one century forward into the future. But the machine has a recall function, so a horrified Wells summons it back to the 19^th century and uses it to follow Leslie to 1979. Wells assumes that he’s let Jack the Ripper loose on Utopia and, predictably, is more than a little disappointed to find that the 20^th century is less utopian than he’d anticipated. Meanwhile, the Ripper has taken to the era’s violence, sleaze and heavy-decibel rock music like a duck to water.

A quirky and very entertaining movie, Time After Time was written and directed by Nicholas Meyer who, regrettably, devoted most of his energies to the less adventurous and eccentric, and more mainstream and family-friendly Star Trek franchise during the 1980s. Actually, it’s probably because of Meyer’s involvement that both Warner and Malcolm McDowell have made appearances in Star Trek films – Warner was in both Star Trek V and VI (1989 and 1991). I’m not much of a fan of Star Trek or its movie spin-offs, but I like the sixth one, largely because Warner is in it. He plays Chancellor Gorkon, charismatic leader of the Klingons and obviously modelled on the then Soviet leader Mikael Gorbachev, who’s decided it’s time for the Klingon Empire to pursue peace-talks with the Federation.

In 1981 Warner delivered another memorable performance in Terry Gilliam’s cinematic fairy tale The Time Bandits. He plays Evil, who’s been created by Ralph Richardson’s Supreme Being and then imprisoned in a hellish place called the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness. Obviously, Warner and Richardson’s characters are the Devil and God under different monikers. Some fine actors have played Old Nick in movies over the years, including Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson, but for my money Warner’s portrayal is the most entertaining. His Devil is a petulant and embittered type who spends his time ranting at his idiotic minions (“Shut up! I’m speaking rhetorically!”) about how rubbish God is. The Almighty, he argues, has wasted His time creating useless things such as slugs, and nipples for men, and 43 species of parrots, when He could have concentrated on making laser beams, car phones and VCRs. Warner steals the show in The Time Bandits, which is no minor achievement considering that in addition to Richardson the film stars Ian Holm, John Cleese, Sean Connery, Michael Palin, Shelley Duvall and a delightful gang of time-traveling dwarves led by David Rappaport.

Thereafter, Warner’s CV filled with all manner of odd movies, hardly Shakespearean in the acting opportunities they offered, but relished by obsessives like myself. These include 1979’s Nightwing, 1980’s The Island, 1987’s Waxwork, 1991’s Cast a Deadly Spell, 1995’s In the Mouth of Madness, 1997’s Scream 2 and 2010’s Black Death.

As an actor he’s adept at playing out-and-out villains, for example, his Dillinger / Sark character in the 1981 Disney computer-game fantasy Tron, a movie that was unappreciated at the time but that, in the decades since, has been accorded considerable retro-cool. He’s also good at doing mad scientists, like the splendidly named Doctor Alfred Necessiter in the whacky 1982 comedy The Man with Two Brains, which is poignant today as a reminder of the time when Steve Martin used to be funny.

But he also has harassed and melancholic qualities, which come nicely to the fore when he’s playing fathers. He was, for instance, the heroine’s father in 1984’s The Company of Wolves, Neil Jordan’s atmospheric and sensual adaptation of Angela Carter’s gothic short stories. Meanwhile, in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes, he plays Senator Sandar, father of dishy chimpanzee Helena Bonham-Carter. In heavy simian make-up and in Warner’s unmistakable tones, Sandar sighs at one point: “Youth is wasted on the young…”

In 1997 Warner found time to appear in James Cameron’s Titanic, then the biggest-grossest movie of all time. Say what you like about Titanic, about the mawkish love story between Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio, about Billy Zane’s cartoonish performance as the villain, about the unspeakable theme song sung by Celine Dion, but you can’t deny that it has a great supporting cast: Warner, Kathy Bates, Bernard Hill, Victor Garber, Bill Paxton. Warner, playing Spicer Lovejoy, Zane’s valet, doesn’t have much to do apart from connive with his master, stalk around, spy on Kate Winslet and generally behave sinisterly. He does, though, get to punch Di Caprio in the guts after he’s been handcuffed to a railing on board the sinking liner, which is actually my favourite bit in the film. (Warner also turned up in a 1979 movie called SOS Titanic and the Titanic features in The Time Bandits too. Thus, he’s a titanic actor in all senses of the term.)

Warner has long been a fixture on television as well. He’s appeared in one-off TV movies and dramas like 1984’s Frankenstein, where he plays the creature to Robert Powell’s Victor Frankenstein and Carrie Fisher’s Elizabeth, 1993’s Body Bags and 2003’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; appeared in series and mini-series like 1981’s Masada, 1982’s Marco Polo, 1984’s Charlie, 2011’s Secret of Crickley Hall and, from 2008 to 2016, Wallander, in which he plays another father, this time to Kenneth Branagh; and lent his voice to animated shows, including the Superman, Batman and Spiderman ones during the 1990s.

Some of his TV work is as cult-y as his film work. In 1991, he guest-starred in three episodes of David Lynch’s glorious, off-the-wall crime / horror / sci-fi / soap opera Twin Peaks, playing Thomas Eckhardt, a Hong Kong-based crime-lord who has a long and dark history with Joan Chen’s Jocelyn Packard. Two years after that, he appeared in the underrated, Oliver Stone-produced mini-series Wild Palms, a hybrid of conspiracy thriller, Alice in Wonderland and the then-recent literary genre of cyberpunk. Set in a near-future USA, under the heel of an organisation that’s part multinational corporation and part Scientology-style religious sect, the show features Warner as Eli, the leader of an underground resistance movement. (This clip neatly encapsulates Wild Palms’ weird energy.) And in 2014 he popped up in John Logan and Sam Mendes’ gothic horror mash-up Penny Dreadful, in the role of Bram Stoker’s vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing. Because Warner played Frankenstein’s creature in 1984, it’s ironic that in Penny Dreadful – in a cheeky tangling of Stoker and Mary Shelley’s original narratives – Van Helsing gets killed by the same creature, played this time by Rory Kinnear.

In 2005 Warner was involved with the macabre TV comedy show The League of Gentlemen, written by and starring Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson. In fact, he didn’t appear in the show itself, but in its cinematic spinoff The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse. Like many a film-based-on-a-TV-show, it doesn’t really work on the big screen, though its most effective scenes are definitely those featuring Warner as a 17^th century magician called Dr Erasmus Pea. His character is rottenly evil but he’s very amusing too. For example, while Dr Pea uses a pan to fry a hellish concoction including two recently gouged-out eyeballs, from which he plans to grow a monstrous homunculus, the camera cuts to a close-up and he pulls a pretentiously absorbed, TV-chef expression worthy of Jamie Oliver.

Warner clearly gets along with The League of Gentlemen’s creators, because since then he has appeared alongside Mark Gatiss in the radio comedy show Nebulous (2005-8); in The Cold War, a 2013 Gatiss-scripted episode of Doctor Who; and in The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge, a 2015 episode of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s acclaimed anthology show Inside No. 9.

The 21^st century has seen Warner return to the stage, giving well-received turns as the venerable and vulnerable monarch in King Lear in 2005 and as Falstaff in Henry IV Parts I and II in 2007. His IMDb entry lists his most recent movie appearance as 2018’s Mary Poppins Returns and says he was still doing voice-work last year. Warner is now at an age where you wouldn’t begrudge for him retiring and choosing an easier life of armchairs, cardigan, slippers and pipe, but I for one hope that some young filmmakers – perhaps ones who grew up enjoying his performances in The Omen, Time After Time, The Time Bandits and Tron when they were shown on TV – coax him into making a few more movies. He’s the sort of actor whose mere presence in a film, no matter how good or bad, gives you a glow.