But when the cord got too knotted and icy to hold, four stuntmen were swallowed by the rapids and killed. The stuntmen were meant to grab on to the loops as they jumped from the boats. For a scene where prospectors’ canoes are swept down the wild Yukon River, a cord with safety loops was strung across the river. This adventure tale of gold rush prospectors in Canada proved that sometimes even the most intrepid stuntmen were no match for Mother Nature.
BUSTER KEATON MOVIES ICE MOVIE
Though Lloyd certainly had help, his classic scene continues to make time stand still, figuratively and literally, for generations of movie fans. Cameras were cleverly angled to show the street below. As for the clock scene, a set replicating the building’s top two floors was constructed on the roof of the actual building, with mattresses laid down in case Lloyd fell the twenty feet or so.
But after Lloyd’s death in 1970, stuntman Harvey Parry revealed that he had handled most of the really treacherous parts – the flips and near-falls. For years, it was thought that comedian Harold Lloyd made the dizzying ascent by himself. A pasty-faced, bespectacled young man dangling from the minute hand of an enormous clock twelve stories above a city street. It’s probably the most famous image of the silent era. Over the next thirty years, Canutt was Hollywood’s first-call stunt cowpoke, leaping off horses and getting dragged through the sagebrush. A few of the action scenes were so thrilling, they were later used as stock footage for numerous other westerns. He still got tossed, and in one scene, it’s clear that Rex is trying to stamp Canutt straight into cowboy heaven. The ride was so wild that Canutt had the horse’s wranglers tie his wrists and ankles around Rex’s neck and torso. In this western, he goes mano-a-mane-o with Rex, a vicious black stallion who’d already killed a man in another film. Yakima Canutt in Devil Horse (1926)įormer rodeo star Yakima Canutt never met a bronco he couldn’t bust. Wings won the first Oscar for Best Picture, and though Grace broke his neck during the shoot, he went on to form his own movie stunt troop, called The Squadron Of Death. He also wore a spring-loaded shock absorber belt extending from his backside to his armpits. His secret? Aside from crazy courage, Grace sawed wings and aircraft parts into break-away sections to soften the blow upon impact. In Wings, he hung from a rope ladder out of a cockpit and crashed several planes into barren fields and lakes. Stuntman Dick Grace called himself “a crack-up engineer.” As an Army pilot in World War I, he honed the skills that made him Hollywood’s go-to guy for aerial stunts.
Buster later called the stunt one of his “greatest thrills,” then added, “I was mad at the time, or I would never have done the thing.” 2. He also saw the cameraman turn away as the shot rolled. Minutes before shooting, Keaton noticed a few crew members praying.
The window was just big enough to give him two inches of clearance on either side. house front was on a hinge, and Keaton drove a nail in the ground to mark his position. Eighty years on, it still looks impossible. But he escapes unhurt because his body is perfectly framed by an open window. As he stares unblinking at the camera, the front wall of a two-story house crashes down on him. (1928)Īfter being blown around by a cyclone in this film, a dazed Buster Keaton stops in the middle of a street to catch his breath. And in an era long before CGI, these amazing feats were performed in real-time, the result of careful planning, physical skill and immense courage. Slipping on banana peels, falling from moving cars, teetering on high window ledges-audiences loved to see comedians testing the boundaries of gravity. Silent movie comedy was all about slapstick and sight gags.
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