Danger on the Silver Screen
No one ever won an Oscar for stunt work. Despite requests from Steven Spielberg and other prominent directors, the Academy has never seen fit to honor the men (and increasingly the women) who usually do the hard work of jumping from fast cars, falling from cliffs, toppling from horseback or crashing their motor bikes.
Usually—because as Scott McGee observes in Danger on the Silver Screen, in early days big stars commonly did their own stunts. Yes, silent movie buffs, Lillian Gish was really floating down the rapids on an ice flow in D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920) and Gloria Swanson was being pawed by a real lion in Male and Female (1919). Douglas Fairbanks Sr. did many of his own stunts, albeit aided by such studio trickery as hidden trampolines and concealed hand grips.
Before long it became clear that bankable stars were too valuable to risk in icy waters or lions’ dens. For Ben Hur (1925), stunt riders were paid $5,000 (huge money back then). Several stuntmen were injured during the grueling chariot race and some horses fell dead before reaching the finish line. For the first Oscar winner for Best Picture, the fighter ace adventure Wings (1927), director William Wellman (himself a World War I pilot) hired flyers to enact the choreography of aerial combat. Realism was enhanced by staged crash landings.
A name that recurs several times in Danger is Richard Talmadge. In the 1920s he was Fairbanks’ stunt double for the swashbuckler’s hardest scenes and after breaking his neck, back, ankles, arms, legs and ribs, he finally segued into stunt coordination, supervising a crew of professional daredevils on films such as How the West was Won (1962). One of them, Jack Williams, had debuted at age four, tossed between horse riders in a 1926 flick.
Despite the legion of stunt people at Hollywood’s disposal, some stars in more recent times insisted on doing it themselves. Steve McQueen did much of his own motorcycle riding in The Great Escape (1963) but, balking at jumping over a six-foot barbed wire barrier, called on his friend Bud Ekins. After The Great Escape, Ekins performed in a few more pictures but wasn’t eager for the work. “I was scared a lot of times, afraid I was going to get hurt,” he admitted. For Bullitt (1968), McQueen was behind the wheel of the Mustang that raced through San Francisco streets—some of the time. His old buddy Ekins doubled for him during the most dangerous turns.
Surveying a century of Hollywood feature films, Danger on the Silver Screen does valuable work by highlighting the contributions of cast members who put their lives on the line—the line of death—to tell the story.
Danger on the Silver Screen is published by Running Press.
