Hollywood Bulldogs, review: a glorious tale of the crash-bang-wallop lives of movie stuntmen
There was a period in the 1980s when pretending to be a stuntman was the playground game of choice, thanks entirely to Lee Majors in The Fall Guy. You remember the tune: “Might jump an open drawbridge/Or Tarzan from a vine/’Cos I’m the unknown stuntman/That makes Eastwood look so fine.” Generally, though, stunt performers are the unsung heroes of the film business. One of the great tricks played in the movies is convincing you that they are not involved at all.
Hollywood Bulldogs (now on ITVX after originally being available on BritBox) is a documentary that puts them in the spotlight – specifically, a handful of British stuntmen who dominated the business through the 1970s and 1980s (much of this work is now done, boringly, through CGI). Director Jon Spira’s lovingly-made film lets them do the talking, interspersed with clips of their work. And it is glorious.
The names: Vic Armstrong, Ray Austin, Jim Dowdall, Richard Hammatt, Frank Henson, Greg Powell, Rocky Taylor and Paul Weston. The stunts: well, where do we start? Jumping off bridges, falling out of helicopters, smashing through windows, skidding off motorbikes, going up in flames, and all manner of driving and crashing cars, from staging the Ford-Capri-over-Tower-Bridge scene in Brannigan to jumping a rickshaw over a camel in Octopussy.
Sometimes they double for the stars – Armstrong’s physical resemblance to Harrison Ford led to a long and happy working relationship on the Indiana Jones films – but often they were the nameless henchmen. See Powell on The Spy Who Loved Me: “I think I got killed about seven times in different outfits.”
They have such a wealth of stories, every one a corker. Coming into the business via various routes, they professionalised a job that until their arrival had consisted of bouncers, boxers and barmen and would have caused any modern health and safety officer “to be ambulanced off the set with a heart attack”. The risks remained, though. Taylor sustained severe injuries in a leap from a rooftop through a wall of fire (the scene was directed by Michael Winner, who emerges as quite the villain).
These men are brave but not fearless, a distinction all are at pains to point out. “If you’ve got any sense, there’s fear,” says Austin. Armstrong explains his thought process when about to perform a 100ft fall in Omen III: The Final Conflict: “Standing there on the viaduct, looking down, the airbag looks about this big, and you know you’re going to be doing 70-80mph when you hit it.” Stunt work, he says, is about overcoming your natural instincts: “Falling off a horse is like falling out of a perfectly good aeroplane – why would you do it?”
