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Hollywood's most dangerous director: why there will never be another Richard Rush

Peter O'Toole in Richard Rush's The Stunt Man - 20th Century Fox
Peter O'Toole in Richard Rush's The Stunt Man - 20th Century Fox

The passing of Richard Rush, the writer-director who died last week aged 91, strikes me as the epitaph to something – a certain era of risk-taking in American cinema. His career is one of Hollywood’s great might-have-beens. According to Variety, he gave away the rights to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and turned down Jaws. In the last 40 years, he was only responsible for one film, and that was his worst – the dilapidated Bruce Willis erotic thriller Color of Night (1994), about which the less said the better.

But for the two decades when he was fully active, from his debut Too Soon to Love (1960) up until the magnificent, triply-Oscar-nominated The Stunt Man (1980), he brought a raucous imaginative daring to the screen. His admirers included Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut and Quentin Tarantino, who regularly picks his films in cult revival slots. For the in-the-know, the title of The Hateful Eight is really paying homage not to The Magnificent Seven, but to an infinitely more disreputable grindhouse effort by Rush, the biker revenge flick The Savage Seven (1968).

Rush made a dozen films overall, but remarkably, a full six of these were released pell-mell in 1967-8, establishing him as both an adventurous director for hire and an almost accidental chronicler of Sixties counterculture along the way. As one of the first students of UCLA’s film programme, he was in the right place at the right time to catch that particular wave, and thrust himself onto the Hollywood scene with a flurry of genre flicks while his more ambitious projects gestated.

The exploitation youth romance Too Soon to Love, which Rush made for $50,000 and sold to Universal for five times that sum, came right off the back of Godard’s A bout de souffle, and was identified by critics at the time as the first film of a putative American New Wave – nine years before Easy Rider cashed in on that same idea.

Rush’s debut even had a small part for a then-unknown Jack Nicholson, who would star for him subsequently in the Roger Corman-esque biker quickie Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) and the rather fascinating Psych-Out (1968), top-billing Susan Strasberg as a deaf runaway who joins a hippie commune while searching for her missing brother.

Both these films are up on YouTube in their entirety, and the last five minutes of Psych-Out are especially remarkable. Strasberg’s character has been given hallucinogens and wanders into the street alone. Lampposts burst into flame as the drug takes hold, and roaring headlights on the highway zoom towards her like fireballs. Dictated as it was by the film’s obligation to have an anti-drug message, the sequence has serious trippy flair, even seeming to anticipate the hallucinatory slipperiness of Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street.

Rush was no stranger to star power by this point: he’d followed up his debut with Of Love and Desire (1963), a lurid potboiler starring the 52-year-old Merle Oberon as an incestuous nymphomaniac. As the Sixties drew to an end, he stepped up the political urgency of his filmmaking with Getting Straight (1970), another Tarantino favourite, and one of a slew of studio-funded responses that year to the campus protests of the late 1960s, along with Stuart Hagmann’s The Strawberry Statement, Stanley Kramer’s B.P.M., and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point.

By far the most commercially successful of those, Getting Straight had an iconic part for Elliott Gould, as a former radical who decides to knuckle down and become a teacher by completing his Master’s, but is forced to reassess his values by the explosion of campus unrest around him. There are bravura set-pieces, including an oral exam scene where Gould’s Harry Bailey sits and seethes while the “homosexual panic” underlying The Great Gatsby is explained to him by a smug faculty member: eventually, Harry can’t take any more, and jumps up to make a mockery of the whole scenario. It starts out as an intense, literary and loaded scene, but it ends in pure farce, exemplifying Rush’s ability to swerve between high-brow and low-brow impulses in the blink of an eye.

San Francisco being destroyed in Richard Rush's Freebie and The Bean - Alamy
San Francisco being destroyed in Richard Rush's Freebie and The Bean - Alamy

Just at this point when industry respect started tipping in his direction, Rush’s strike rate started to slow down. His next hit for Warner Brothers, Freebie and the Bean (1974), was an early example of the mismatched buddy-cop formula, complete with wacky stunts and copious car crashes, which became 1980s catnip when the likes of 48 Hrs and Lethal Weapon came along.

Though it drew eager crowds, it was critically dismissed as a tasteless joyride which had bulldozed its way around San Francisco during production, and has a reputation for being hella-problematic, with some racist and homophobic overtones which were shocking enough even for the time, and certainly wouldn’t fly today. I haven’t seen the whole thing, but a handful of highlights are on YouTube.

We get plainclothes partners James Caan and Alan Arkin treading on each other’s lines – even corpsing, as I think I spotted in the trailer; Caan bursts into a dentist’s at one point and shoots a nurse by accident, and the pair then careen off a bridge and right into the bedroom of a speechless elderly couple. Somehow, watching it in this jumbled, pick-and-mix way rather suits Rush’s helter-skelter style. You can tell he had a talent for the collision of action and comedy which puts Richard Donner to shame.

Everything was leading up to The Stunt Man, the film Rush was obviously born to make, even if it took him 10 years to get it on screen. This rip-roaring satire of filmmaking excess started out as a 1970 novel by Paul Brodeur which Columbia optioned, hoping Truffaut or Arthur Penn might have a crack at it. When it fell into Rush’s hands, he submitted his own 150-page treatment which the studio rejected in bafflement. As he once explained: “They couldn’t figure out if it was a comedy, a drama, if it was a social satire, if it was an action adventure… and, of course, the answer was, ‘Yes, it's all those things.’ But that isn't a satisfactory answer to a studio executive.”

Carried away by the project’s possibilities, Rush bought the rights off Columbia himself and shopped it around the other studios for years, with no one biting. Eventually, the film came together with independent financing, and what a heady, one-of-a-kind venture it is. Steve Railsback plays a fugitive Vietnam vet, wanted for murder, who stumbles onto the set of a WWI epic being shot near San Diego, and hides out posing as a stunt double. (They need a new one, the last having just drowned by driving off a bridge.)

Presiding over the reckless chaos of the shoot is a tyrannical auteur called Eli Cross, played by a gloriously full-throttle Peter O’Toole, whose God-like view of himself is reinforced by the number of moments when he’s seen swooping around in a helicopter or swinging from a crane. He cares nothing for his minions or their mortality: getting the next shot perfectly lined up is all that matters.

O’Toole always claimed that he partly based the character on David Lean, but there’s just as much of Rush himself in this quixotic showman. The film is a riot of ideas, flinging philosophy and action together in ways American cinema has hardly dared since: just when you think you can predict its next zig, it zags. Pauline Kael raved about its “slapstick metaphysics”.

Peter O'Toole in Richard Rush's The Stunt Man - Alamy
Peter O'Toole in Richard Rush's The Stunt Man - Alamy

It absolutely sums up Rush’s appeal, in that it could hardly seem less beholden to the algorithms of big-studio taste, making it a rare specimen indeed at a time when all the smart, dull money was being funnelled into franchises. The meddling bean-counters wouldn’t touch this one with a bargepole.

Nor did they have any idea what to do with it. “The film wasn’t released. It escaped,” O’Toole once said on a DVD commentary. Even after the best reviews of Rush’s career, resulting in Oscar nominations for Best Director, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay, The Stunt Man was consigned to a limited release and never had a chance to attract a mainstream audience. It’s been reissued on home video so seldom that it seems to spend whole decades out of print.

The fact that it represents the pinnacle of Rush’s art was certainly not for want of trying. He wrote the first draft of the adaptation for Air America, hoping to direct it himself around 1985 as the first satirical anti-war comedy about Vietnam. But it sank into development hell, with all sorts of A-list stars (Connery, Costner, Murray) getting attached then dropping out, and by then Good Morning Vietnam (1987) had stolen its thunder.

Bruce Willis and Jane March in Richard Rush's final film, Color Of Night - Getty
Bruce Willis and Jane March in Richard Rush's final film, Color Of Night - Getty

Rush pulled away from that wreckage well before the Mel Gibson/Robert Downey Jr/Roger Spottiswoode version saw the light of day in 1990. Then there was Color of Night, a doolally psychiatric drama with kinky sex as the cherry on top, whose producer, Andrew Vajna, fired Rush and asserted his right to a re-edit late in post-production.

Around the time of that botched release, Kenneth Turan wrote in the LA Times that Rush’s career fell foul constantly of “the kind of miserable luck that never seems to afflict the untalented.” He stepped away from filmmaking afterwards, except for a documentary about the making of The Stunt Man, which went on its 2001 DVD and helped bump the film’s reputation up a further notch.

To the end, Rush’s notoriety persisted as a wayward, hard-bargaining talent of the John Huston school, who could never be told what to do: his filmmaking was anything but safe. It dangles sky-high, in The Stunt Man’s case, straddling a half-dozen genres at once with a logistical verve that defies, if not death, then at least the strictures of commercial good sense. It’s that dizzy feeling of danger that makes his legacy so fascinating.