Hooper (1978)

(On Cable TV, January 2020) I repeat myself, but I’ll say it again: I’m astonished that there aren’t more movies about stuntmen. It’s a naturally dramatic premise, it’s Hollywood-related, it’s meta and it’s spectacular. What else do you need? At least there was a brief spate of such films back in the late 1970s, with Hooper being the best of them. It’s really not an accident if the film came from a collaboration between Burt Reynolds and director Hal Needham—both actors/former stuntmen who had a streak of successful collaboration on stunt-heavy comedies from Smokey and the Bandit to Stroker Ace, through one of my favourites The Cannonball Run. Hooper was the second of their big collaboration, and it’s as definitive a statement on the life and thrills of professional stunts as you can still imagine. The film goes into the nitty-gritty of the profession and the tolls it takes, the kind of personality it attracts, and the relationships between stuntmen and other people around them. The biggest surprise here is that the film is as much of a character study as it’s a showcase for big stunts, with a finale that collapses chimney stacks, blows up tanker trucks and has the protagonist jump over a damaged bridge. Reynolds is ridiculously charismatic here, and there’s a sense that he’s spending accumulated starpower to work with Needham in delivering an homage to their former profession. (It was several years in the making.) Then-veteran Needham seems to be having fun as well in staging action setpieces, poking fun at the Hollywood machine and letting Reynolds play in his element. The stunts, as befit such a film, are exceptionally impressive, especially in a post-CGI world—for a film dealing with danger, it’s appropriate to fear (even a little bit) for the characters and the stuntmen stepping in for the characters. And that, unfortunately, may clue us in as to why the late 1970s were the golden age for stunt movies—as special effects grew during the Modern Hollywood era, so did the artifice—while stuntpeople are still risking their lives for movies today (and still too often dying for it), no one will ever greenlight a project perceived as dangerous and even if they did, there would be so much CGI as to contradict the theme of a stunt film. Audiences simply wouldn’t believe it unless extraordinary care would be taken in selling the illusion. The other thing is simpler: Hooper does such a terrific job at exploring the world of stunts that it may never be equalled. Maybe it’s better not to attempt it.