In praise of Yakima Canutt, the stunt daredevil who risked his neck for Hollywood classics

It is 10 December 1938, and the set of Atlanta is on fire. The blaze is ferocious, smoke billowing so high that Los Angeles citizens fear something has gone horribly wrong at the RKO Forty Acres backlot. Seven Technicolor cameras, 27 cameramen and over 40 police and firemen stand by. Two metal pipes – one of kerosene oil, the other of water – steer the fire, while wooden sets from old RKO productions feed the flames. This fire is demanding. 

Gone with the Wind producer David O. Selznick cannot risk losing his Rhett Butler on the first day of filming. Only one man could match Clark Gable’s physique and stand the blaze. Slap-bang in the middle of a cinematic inferno, flames licking his crisp-white linen suit, Yakima Canutt watches Hollywood burn.

Few people knew Enos Edward Canutt, the whip-smart boy whose family claimed that he shot out the womb roping the bedpost. It would be the dogged youth’s years on top of bucking horses and hanging off bulls’ horns around Yakima county that would earn Yak his name and reputation. A reputation that found him in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) for a stunt that required him to leap on to a herd of horses racing at 45 miles per hour. After the dust had settled, and several camera operators became doubtful that they caught the stunt in full, an eager Yakima – ready to have another go – was clipped by Ford’s interjection that he’ll “never shoot that again. They better have it.” And have it, they did. The camera barely took its eye away from Canutt: his windswept vault, his plummet through the horses, his body dragging behind the stampede. After Stagecoach wrapped, Ford summoned Yakima to his office. “Anytime I’m making an action picture,” Ford told Canutt, “you are with me.”

Stagecoach had ridden Hollywood to a new frontier, with Canutt fast on its trail. The following decade would rapidly expand Yakima’s cinematic horizons, finding him frequently taking the reins as second unit director of productions such as Devil’s Doorway (1950), Ivanhoe (1952) and Old Yeller (1957). Under Canutt’s leadership, stunt scenes continued to push the boundaries of realism on the silver screen: an 80-foot high cliff dive with six horses, a troop of gorillas charging at the camera; the transition from stunt performer to action director had been a smooth one for Canutt, whose body had started to feel the effects of 40 years of horse wrangling.

It was a toll every stunt artist had to pay in their own way: Buster Keaton’s neck, Harold Lloyd’s fingers, Fred Kennedy’s life. “You gave a cowboy 20 bucks and a bottle of whiskey,” remembered Charlton Heston, “and let him risk his neck.” Canutt was no stranger to this risk (an August 1925 edition of Moving Picture World announced a young Yakima’s recovery at a local hospital after a flame torch exploded while he was riding at high speed). He had made progress throughout his career to strengthen the safeguarding of stunt performers and animals. It’s no surprise, then, that when the head of production for MGM, Walter Strohm, presented Canutt with the opportunity to remake a 30-year-old action scene that had seen the death of one stuntman and over 100 horses, Yakima grabbed at it with both hands.

For Ben-Hur’s chariot race Charlton Heston was given one instruction: stay in the chariot; Yak would make sure he won “the damn race”. Co-directed with fellow second unit action director Andrew Marton, this ‘damn race’ with its 15,000 extras, 70 horses and 18-acres of land was Canutt personified. It was in the safety measures, the hydraulic brakes on the chariots and protective harnesses on the horses. It was in Heston’s stunt double, Joe Canutt, the spitting image of his father. It was in the fall of Messala as he is thrusted out of his crumbling chariot, body skidding along the sand, trampled by a charge of horses. 

When the camera remains close on Messala, weak and dying in the hoove-ridden dust, there is a spark of recognition like a glint behind tinted spectacles and a cloud of smoke. A dubious William Wyler, receiving reports on poor screenings of the chariot scene, watched a rough cut the Sunday Yakima and Randall wrapped. “Well Yak,” Wyler later said to Canutt, “All I can say is my stuff has got to be great to match it.” There were no deaths – stuntman or horse – during filming. The biggest injury belonged to Joe who, after ignoring his father’s instructions to avoid holding the front rail of the chariot, received a cut to the chin after launching into the air.

Just under a decade later, Yakima Canutt would reunite with Charlton Heston on stage at the 39th Academy Awards. Recognised for his achievements as a “stunt man and for developing safety devices to protect stunt men everywhere”, Canutt would become the first stunt person to win an honourary Oscar. It would be the next century until Canutt was joined by another. 

It is the poisoned chalice of the stunt performer, the chameleonic nature of their work driving their pursuit for realism that renders them almost invisible to the audience’s eye. Even for Canutt, he is best spotted scattered across the body of film: the gait of John Wayne, the back of Clark Gable or the eye of John Ford. If you freeze the frame fast enough, you’ll be able to catch a glimpse of the man of movement. Caught like a cinematic spectre amid the flames of Atlanta, welcoming a new Hollywood.

Art of Action plays in cinemas across the UK and online on BFI Player from October to December 2024.