An aging Hollywood stuntman drives around a bygone Los Angeles, relaxing in his trailer with a beer after a punishing day of crashing cars, fist fighting and mouthing off. But this isn’t last year’s critical and commercial favorite. Decades before Quentin Tarantino gave us Brad Pitt’s aging daredevil Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Burt Reynolds stepped into the role in Hooper, a goofy and action-packed homage to movie-making and the stuntmen who batter themselves to get the shot.
For a fair stretch of the ’70s, Burt Reynolds was the biggest movie star in America and the definition of the male sex symbol. Farrah Fawcett was the bikini queen on the bedroom poster, but Burt was the king of the big screen. His starring role in Smokey and the Bandit turned it into the second highest-grossing release of 1977, just behind Star Wars. His earlier roles in Deliverance and The Longest Yard showed glimmers of real craft and soulfulness in his acting, but once he became a huge star, it seemed that all he wanted to do was donuts in a Trans Am while raking in truckloads of money. That’s pretty much the premise for Hooper, but the playfulness of the script and the camaraderie of the actors makes for an engaging inside view of the eccentric characters of Hollywood’s stunt industry.
Reynolds plays Sonny Hooper, a stuntman who’s on the verge of aging out of the profession. (A doctor, warning him that the next stunt could cripple him, says, “If you were a horse, I’d shoot you.”) A young hotshot, Ski (Jan-Michael Vincent) threatens to displace Sonny, and their rivalry gives the thin plot its shape. But the film is more interested in exploring the characters’ working days and carousing nights, as if the film industry were one big fraternity party and they’re all intent on tearing the house down. James Best, familiar as Rosco P. Coltrane on television’s “Dukes of Hazzard,” plays an affable sidekick, and Terry Bradshaw of the Pittsburgh Steelers turns up with his gap-toothed grin in a fist-flying cameo.
Hooper has a naturalistic feel, channeling some of the qualities of American New Wave films like Easy Rider and Nashville with on-location shooting and long takes full of chatter and visual texture. The film lingers longer on an early-morning hangover than on the party that preceded it. A long sequence of stuntmen and crew members drinking and carousing while joyriding along the Pacific Coast Highway doesn’t do much to advance the story but offers a glimpse of the adolescent zeal for danger and pranks that animates Sonny and his gang of carousers. The off-camera lives of the characters are as wacky and dangerous as the stunts they perform on set, a contrast which rhymes with other films-about-films like Truffaut’s Day for Night and the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!.
Reynolds enjoys himself in the clowning mode that defined so much of his appeal at the time: gum-smacking, wise-cracking, giggling in falsetto, and sometimes leering directly at the camera to make sure we know he’s just goofing around. Combined with his matinee idol looks, his charm is potent even if the macho posturing and casual sexism feel dated. His chemistry with Sally Field, his girlfriend both on and off the screen, feels authentic and leavens some of the adolescent rowdiness, but her character isn’t developed beyond her devotion to the maddeningly juvenile Sonny. Mustached and grinning, with a loose-limbed swagger, Reynolds feels like a movie star from a different age, closer to Errol Flynn or Clark Gable than to any of today’s conflicted and nuanced leading men.
Action movie clichés populate the storyline, but the meta aspect lends them a Looney Tunes quality. A massive barroom brawl erupts like a lightning strike, fists flying and bottles smashing as all the men in the room begin waling on anyone within reach. Once the bar is demolished, the antagonists end up tossed through a window onto a pile of garbage bags where they all burst into laughter and become fast friends. An epic car chase occurs entirely without context, replete with explosions bursting out of the ground, an ambulance cannonballing into a hospital and a massive chimney collapsing over the road, all leading up to the grandest stunt of all: jumping a rocket-powered Trans Am over a 300-foot canyon. At a time when real-life stuntman Evel Knievel was a household name, such a feat held all the drama of a moonshot.
Part of the joke seems to be that we’re getting a glimpse into the sausage factory of Hollywood filmmaking, where everything is a gag and nothing really makes sense from the ground level. Robert Klein plays the pompous director, apparently styled after Peter Bogdanovich, whose cinematic pretensions are met with rolling eyes and derision by the guys who actually have to perform the feats he wants to get on film. With no clue what any of it means, they leap from helicopters in tuxedos and slide under moving semis on motorcycles and fling themselves off rooftops. It’s all in a day’s work for Sonny and company, who are more interested in having fun pulling off record-breaking feats than in whether any of it makes narrative sense. Here’s where they find common ground with Cliff Booth. The self-seriousness of the auteurs and actors in their midst are ridiculous to them. Hooper is less a love letter to Hollywood than a jolly slap on the back and a punch in the arm.
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