The Movie Doctors. Simon Mayo
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screen icon Louise Brooks was warned by friends and colleagues that Beggars of Life director William Wellman was ‘a madman’ who would try to get her to take part in dangerous stunts from which she should steer well clear. Yet, true to form, Brooks merely saw the warnings as a challenge, and opted to do several potentially lethal scenes herself, including a sequence in which she jumps a freight train with co-star Richard Arlen. Apparently, the rule of thumb for hobos at the time was that if you couldn’t count the lug nuts on the wheels of a train, it was moving too fast to board. Just try counting the lug nuts on the train onto which Brooks jumps in Beggars of Life. Even allowing for a degree of photographic ingenuity, that train is clearly moving fast enough to present a very real danger to the famously fearless actress, who miraculously completed the shoot without needing to be carted off to the local hospital.
In those days, such fortitude was business as usual for screen performers. Leading players Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess performed their own stunts for D.W. Griffith’s masterpiece Way Down East (1920), including the celebrated river sequence in which Gish drifts on a slab of floating ice toward a waterfall while Barthelmess leaps to her death-defying rescue. Filmed at White River Junction in Vermont, the sequence opened with Gish – wearing only a thin dress and a shawl – running out into sub-zero temperatures, the shock of which famously caused her to faint. A nurse was on hand to tend to Gish, but the medical ministrations seem to have amounted to little more than taking the actress indoors to warm up a bit before being sending her outside to do it again. Next, Gish was required to fall face down onto a slab of ice (real ice, as opposed to prop ice) which breaks free and floats off down the river. With her hair and a hand trailing in the icy water, Gish promptly found her face frozen (you can see the ice forming on her skin) and lost the feeling in several fingers. Years later she would note that the hand in question still caused her pain. Meanwhile, Griffith (whose face also froze) kept his camera warm by lighting a small fire beneath it to prevent the machine from grinding to a standstill. To this day, the fact that both Gish and Barthelmess appear to be in genuine peril remains a key part of this legendary sequence’s appeal – an alluring mix of dramatic invention and documentary endangerment.
At around the same time that Gish was having her fingers frozen off on Way Down East, comedian Harold Lloyd was having two fingers blown off his right hand when a prop bomb exploded during the making of Haunted Spooks (1920). Meanwhile Buster Keaton fractured his neck while filming Sherlock Jr. (1924), but continued filming the scene in question, his injury not being detected until it showed up on an X-ray eleven years later! Dancers had a hard time of it too. While shooting a celebrated number for Swing Time (1936), Ginger Rogers was left with bleeding feet, prompting the famous quote that ‘Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels’. As for Astaire, he got whacked in the face by Rogers’ ‘flying sleeve’ while filming ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’ for Follow the Fleet (also 1936) but ‘kept on dancing, although somewhat maimed’. The smack made it into the movie.
Other minor on-set accidents which have been caught on camera include Charles McGraw suffering a broken jaw as his head is forced into a vat of soup by Kirk Douglas in Spartacus (1960); Ellen Burstyn ricking her back while being hoisted off her feet by unseen ropes in The Exorcist (1973); Viggo Mortensen breaking two toes while kicking a helmet in frustration in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002); Robert Downey Jr. breaking Halle Berry’s arm as he attempts to restrain her character in Gothika (2003); and Leonardo DiCaprio accidentally smashing a glass with his hand in 2012’s Django Unchained (‘Blood was dripping down his hand [but] he never broke character,’ recalled producer Stacey Sher admiringly). Meanwhile, Brad Pitt spent a large portion of Se7en (1995) with a heavily bandaged arm after accidentally putting his hand through a car window (‘we worked his injury into the storyline’), and during the filming of Troy (2004), in which he plays hunky Achilles, managed to tear – guess what? – his Achilles tendon!
Afflictions such as these are all part of the rough and tumble of moviemaking, and there can be few performers whose screen careers have passed without a work-related visit to A & E. Oddly, audiences seem to rather like the idea of performers suffering actual bodily harm for the sake of their entertainment, provided the injuries remain relatively trivial. Yet the occasional tragedy shows us just how dangerous moviemaking can really be, and reminds us why film-making unions spend so much time banging on unfashionably about ‘health and safety’.
Films may be fantasy, but on-set accidents are real, and the Movie Doctors look forward to a future in which cinema is not just spectacular, but – more importantly – safe. As executive producer Steven Spielberg observed in the wake of the Twilight Zone (1983) tragedy, ‘A movie is a fantasy – it’s light and shadow flickering on a screen. No movie is worth dying for. I think people are standing up much more now than ever before to producers and directors who ask too much. If something isn’t safe, it’s the right and responsibility of every actor or crew member to yell, “Cut!”’
CAR CHASES FOR THE CONSTIPATED
Doctors in Discussion
Dr Kermode: So, car chases.
Dr Mayo: I don’t really like them.
Dr K: Really?
Dr M: Yes. Apart from the obvious . . .
Dr K: Bullitt, The French Connection . . .
Dr M: Sure, those but also the three that spring to my mind: the Minis in The Italian Job, the police car pile-up in The Blues Brothers and the Moscow chase in The Bourne Supremacy. Apart from those . . .
Dr K: You think they’re boring.
Dr M: Yes, I mean they should be the thing that makes you gasp in awe, makes you have to wipe the seat in the cinema, but that doesn’t really happen, does it?
Dr K: The problem with most movie car chases is that they’re too fast.
Dr M: You want a slow chase?
Dr K: In a way. The thing is, car chases are only exciting when they have a sense of danger – for example, when the streets are crowded. Look at The French Connection. That film was produced by Philip D’Antoni, who produced Bullitt. He and director William Friedkin specifically set out to top the car chase from Bullitt . . .
Dr M: A pretty tough call given there’s the Steve McQueen effect in Bullitt.
Dr K: . . . and the most memorable thing about The French Connection chase is the sheer amount of traffic. Indeed, for certain sequences, rather than getting the necessary permissions, and getting the streets properly cleared, they just went ahead and filmed some sequences in the middle of normal traffic.
Dr M: What, with real people, real cars and everything?
Dr K: Yes.
Dr M: And speed bumps?
Dr K: And speed bumps. So Gene Hackman’s car – which stuntman Bill Hickman was driving – does actually bang into a city bus at one point, for real.
Dr M: Ouch. Lawsuit.
Dr K: Oddly, no. The point is that one of the reasons the car chase in The French Connection really is a thrill ride is because it genuinely appears to be dangerous.
Dr