The 1978 Burt Reynolds Hit Hooper Is a Goddamn Delight, a Two-Fisted Tribute to Stunt Men and Hal Needham's Masterpiece
Quentin Tarantino wanted to atone for somehow never working with Burt Reynolds before by giving audiences a potent double dose of Burt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Reynolds was scheduled to follow up his wonderful comeback performance as a Burt Reynolds-like movie star in The Last Movie Star with the small but memorable supporting role of George Spahn, the owner and namesake of the Ranch where Charles Manson and his “Family” marinated in evil and hatched their evil schemes. Unfortunately, Reynolds died while in preparation for the film and was subsequently replaced by Bruce Dern.
An equally well-cast Dern is fantastic as Spahn of course, making the old man a volcanic figure of menace and malice despite being diminished physically to the point where he’s seemingly barely alive, but it would have been wonderful to have seen Reynolds in a juicy role for a simpatico filmmaker so late in his career.
Tarantino also cast James Marsden AS Reynolds in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood but he did not make it into the original film, despite its generous 161 minute runtime, though he was featured in an extended theatrical cut in a fake advertisement for Red Apple, the fictional cigarette that has popped up in many of Tarantino’s movies. Tarantino was paying reverent homage to one of his heroes by having one of his heroes pay winking homage to him and the world he created in a development perhaps too meta to make it into the film’s theatrical cut even for a filmmaker as self-referential and pop-culture-crazed as Tarantino.
But Reynolds’ influence on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood goes beyond his casting and presence within the universe of the movie itself. The film’s reality-spiked fictional universe is also the world Reynolds himself inhabited at the time as a hard-working journeyman television cowboy actor angling for his big break as a movie star.
When Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was set, Reynolds was someone who made his money with his much-abused body as well as that gorgeous face, famously doing many of his own stunts in keeping with his persona as the ultimate alpha male, a real-life tough guy willing to put his body on the line in the service of his art, or at least a paycheck. In 1978’s Hooper and in real life, Reynolds paid the predictable price for his bravery in the form of repeated injuries and a pain pill addiction the seedy details of which were cruelly splashed across tabloids during his prime as one of the most famous people in the world.
The Scorsese to Reynolds’ Robert De Niro was not an intense arthouse auteur but rather legendary stuntman turned filmmaker Hal Needham, who worked his way up from stunts to the director’s chair and presided over a string of Reynolds’ most iconic and successful blockbusters, including 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit, 1978’s Hooper and 1981’s The Cannonball Run.
Needham and Reynolds’ collaborations were primarily designed to make a lot of money with crowd-pleasing hillbilly shenanigans involving car chases, country anthems, zany comic sidekicks and VERY conspicuous Coors over-consumption (the man damn near kept the beer company in business through product placement in his films), barroom brawls and wisecracks and Reynolds’ breezy, effortless movie star charisma.
But their films were also very explicitly designed to showcase the work of Needham and Reynolds’ stuntmen brothers and sisters, to provide the best possible vessel for the oft-overlooked professionals who are the very best in the world at what they do do what they do best in terms of choreographing and executing stunts that could easily result in death or dismemberment if they are not pulled off with meticulousness as well as fearlessness.
Hooper is Reynolds and Needham’s most personal film. It’s their masterpiece, a breezy delight that makes for a fascinating companion to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, another, loving, affectionate exploration of professional communities of manly men and a veteran Hollywood tough guy coming to terms with his own personal and professional mortality at a crucial crossroads in their lives and careers.
The relationship between Reynolds and Needham, who was so damn good at taking falls and crashing cars that he became the first stuntman ever to win a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, helped inspire the similarly tight personal and professional bond between pretty boy actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his best friend and stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), just as Hooper feels inspired by decades upon decades of stuntmen lore passed along as a form of show-business folklore at boozy get-togethers (where exclusively Coors is consumed, if Reynolds films of the era are indication) of stunt lifers through the ages.
In Hooper, Reynolds plays the title character of Sonny Hooper, the greatest stuntman alive. Hooper has a pain pill addiction to go along with all those shattered bones and a spine so beaten up it threatens to send the veteran daredevil and human crash test dummy into an unwanted early retirement.
Hooper buries his fears and tries to kill his pain with pills, hard liquor and sweet, sweet Coors so that he can accomplish the casually heroic gig of doubling for Adam West (playing himself) in a James Bond knock-off directed by hotshot, self-important “auteur” Roger Deal (Robert Klein, slyly sending up Peter Bogdanovich) that just happens to feature some of the greatest stunt-work ever committed to film.
Needham favors long, uninterrupted shots of stuntmen and stuntwomen in action pulling off set-pieces seemingly designed to push even the most expert and experienced veterans to their limits and beyond, which unsurprisingly is also the theme of the movie itself.
In its second half, Hooper shifts from free-spirited, loose-limbed, raucous action-comedy to heavy drama and a movie happily without much use for a plot or conflict becomes a moody meditation on aging, death and mortality about nothing less than Hooper and hotshot protege Delmore Shidski (Jan Michael Vincent) pulling off The Greatest Stunt of All Time as they race around an earthquake set, nimbly avoiding death and explosions and flames before a climactic stunt involving a rocket car traveling record-setting distances at great peril to the hard-working palookas inside it.
The rocket car is one of many reminders that Hooper exploited the 1970s mania for car movies, stunt movies and Evel Knievel in a way that allowed to Needham and Reynolds to push themselves, each other, and their army of stunt people to new heights of ambition and excellence while also telling a story that clearly meant something to them, about a world they knew as well as anyone, and resurrect onscreen with casual authenticity.
Hooper is dedicated to the radical proposition that an action-comedy will be more emotionally satisfying and fun if you care about the person leaping off a tall building or driving a rocket-car off a cliff, particularly if he’s Burt Reynolds in his gum-smacking, grinning, fourth-wall-breaking late 1970s prime.
But Hooper also benefits from a tremendous supporting cast with built-in chemistry, in part because many had been working together for years. America’s diminutive sweetheart and Burt Reynolds’s offscreen girlfriend and frequent costar Sally Field is delightful if a little underused as Hooper’s supportive but concerned teacher girlfriend while Brian Keith is funny and poignant as her dad, a legendary stuntman of a certain age with more than yesterdays than tomorrows.
Keith’s character was based on, and named after, Field’s real-life stuntman stepfather, which helps explain why Field seems so perfectly at home in rowdy, testosterone-heavy tableaus where she is the only woman, most notably a raucous barroom fist fight involving Terry Bradshaw and a whole bunch of other macho bruisers where she struggles to finish her meal while dodging people and limbs flying everywhere.
When it’s content to hang back and luxuriate in the boyish camaraderie and consummate skill of Hooper and his stuntmen buddies, Hooper is wonderful, a light on its feet tribute to the unsung heroes of action filmmaking. Hooper is less fun in its plot and drama-heavy third act but it climaxes with a final set-piece that ranks as a triumph of imagination, precision and bravery. That no one was killed in the making of Hooper is a minor miracle. In its own unpretentious way, Hooper is miraculous in the way cinematic stuntwork executed at this level always is, whether the practitioners are Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton in the silent era or Jackie Chan or Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible movies today.
Hooper would be worth seeing for the stunts alone but it has so much more to offer than just consistently jaw-dropping stunt-work. It also has characters worth believing in, a fascinating, fully realized cultural milieu in the world of stuntmen, and one of Reynolds’ loosest and funniest performances.
In a perfect world, Hooper would end with Hooper climactically throwing an indignant Roger Deal into a pool to the delight of the cast and crew. Hooper, alas, is an imperfect but enormously fun charmer so it ends with our star breaking the fourth wall and giving us a conspiratorial glance before clocking the director right in the jaw, undoubtedly living out the fantasies of countless actors and crew-people cursed to work with Bogdanovich at the height of his egomania.
Hopefully the runaway success of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will attract new attention to Hooper and its iconic star, who was so effortlessly funny that it almost seemed unfair that he was also devastatingly handsome and skilled in all of the manly arts, including, but not limited to, driving cars and taking falls that would terrify lesser souls, and less authentically manly movie stars as well.
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