The birth of action: 10 sensational stunts from the silent era

It’s common knowledge that Jackie Chan idolises Buster Keaton. But the risk-taking exploits of the great silent comedian have also inspired Keanu Reeves and Brad Pitt in their respective stunting in John Wick (2014) and Bullet Train (2022). Tom Cruise is a fan too, hence the references to The General (1926) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), which also tosses in nods to the action in Douglas Fairbanks’s silent take on The Mark of Zorro (1920) and Battleship Potemkin (1925) for good measure.

Such is the sophistication of modern stuntwork that it’s hard to believe that it all started when Frank Hanaway tumbled from his horse in Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903). Nothing remains of the audacious cliff jump performed by an unnamed hypnotist for the 1908 version of The Count of Monte Cristo, however, and it’s a mournful fact that our knowledge of silent cinema is largely serendipitous. Had more footage survived, this article might have dwelt on Emilie Sannom, the intrepid Danish actor whose 85 stunt-filled films would be unknown but for the 1923 showreel Daredevil of the Movies.

Although we now think of stunts in regard to white-knuckle action, the majority of silent feats were more like sight gags, after producer-director Mack Sennett set the trend at Keystone. Keaton and Harold Lloyd introduced slapstick peril, which was celebrated in such affectionate compilations as Days of Thrills and Laughter (1961) and The Great Chase (1962). But so much silent stunting has been forgotten.

Who today recalls the heroics of serial queens like Kathlyn Williams, Norma Phillips and Grace Cunard? Or the uncredited doubling of bump men like Eddie Kelly, Jean Perkins, Dick LaMarr and Charles Hutchison, who eventually became known as “the Thrill-a-Minute Stunt King”? Even here, we can only mention in passing Mabel Normand’s tower eaves hang in Mickey (1918), the clifftop car shunt in Super-Hooper-Dyne Lizzies (1925), the Colorado River flood in The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926), and the kayak rapids plunge in The Trail of ’98 (1928), which cost four stuntmen their lives.

According to John Baxter’s 1974 book Stunt: The Story of the Great Movie Stunt Men, there were 50 fatalities among the 10,794 stunt accidents that occurred in Hollywood between 1925 and 1930. Luckily, Keaton survived, although he nearly drowned attempting the waterfall rope rescue in Our Hospitality (1923) and only discovered years afterwards that he had broken his neck filming the water spout scene in Sherlock Jr. (1924). For this alone, he deserves two entries below.

Pearl White was known as ‘The Peerless Fearless Girl’ for the stunts she performed in the chapterplays that made her a global star. Yet, she told The American magazine in September 1921 that daredevilling was never easy. “I am petrified with fear,” she confessed. “Cold! Frozen! Terrified! I tell you. I’m a coward.” However, she continued, “I’m not ashamed of feeling fear. But I would be ashamed if I let my fear rule me.” 

While filming the hot air balloon sequence for episode 1, ‘Through Air and Fire’, White was cast adrift in the basket when a storm turned a 15-minute ascent into a three-hour nightmare, as the balloon was swept two miles out to sea before floating above the rooftops of New York City. As her fame grew, White employed doubles, with John Stevenson fatally fracturing his skull leaping from the top of a bus on to an elevated girder for her final serial, Plunder (1922).

Kalem Company released 119 episodes of The Hazards of Helen, the longest serial in screen history. Helen Holmes played the intrepid Ferndale telegraph operator in the first 48 entries, rivalling Pearl White and Ruth Roland for the title of Serial Queen. Such was her flair on the tracks that she was nicknamed ‘The Railroad Girl’, with her most daring stunt seeing the skirt-clad Holmes drop from a bridge by rope onto a speeding carriage to capture two bandits in ‘The Escape on the Fast Freight’. 

Former rodeo rider Helen Gibson had occasionally doubled for Holmes before succeeding her. She reckoned “Life is just cluttered up with perils.” So, leaping from a station roof onto a passing train in ‘A Girl’s Grit’ came naturally, even though the rocking motion tilted Gibson towards the edge of the carriage and she had to grab an air vent to avoid falling. Nevertheless, she had the wherewithal to hang over the side for dramatic effect.

Had she not pleaded with the police prefect to lift a nationwide ban on Louis Feuillade’s 417-minute serial, Musidora would not have become the darling of the surrealists as Irma Vep, the black body-stockinged forerunner of the modern superhero. “No one can say,” she once wrote to Cinémagazine, “I used a stand-in for those scenes that my sex entitles me to turn down.” 

In episode 8, ‘The Thunder Master’, she had crouched on a railway line, as freight trucks rumbled overhead. Yet, in a document published in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1964, she admitted a dummy had been used for part of the death-defying rope plunge down the façade of an eight-storey building in episode 10 ‘The Terrible Wedding’. To untutored eyes, it looks like a single take and the twirling descent inspired a Jackie Chan homage in Who Am I? (1998), an apt title given the iconic “Qui? Quoi? Quand? Ou…” posters used to promote Les Vampires.

In the weeks leading up to shooting the ice floe denouement of D.W. Griffith’s adaptation of Lottie Blair Parker’s hoary stage play, Lillian Gish had prepared herself by taking daily ice baths and going out without a coat. Shooting in a blizzard at White River Junction in Vermont, Griffith had dynamited the frozen water and placed Gish on a chunk of ice to give the impression that the much-wronged Anna Moore was floating helplessly towards her waterfall doom. When frost formed on Gish’s eyelashes, Griffith had Billy Bitzer photograph them in close-up. He also agreed when she suggested draping her hair and hands in the freezing water. 

Her reward was a blanket, a cup of tea and lifelong nerve damage in her frostbitten fingers. But, as she confided in her autobiography, The Movies, Mr Griffith, and Me (1969): “No sacrifice was too great to get the film right, to get it accurate, true, and perfect.”

Stuntman Harvey Parry gave the game away in 1980. Harold Lloyd had taken precautions to reduce the risk of hanging from a clock face on a Los Angeles skyscraper. He’d done high-rise comedy before in High and Dizzy (1920) and Never Weaken (1922). But it’s clear from the changing skyline to Lloyd’s right that the clock stunt was performed in different locations. This doesn’t diminish the thrill of the illusion or its ingenuity. 

As his right hand had been badly damaged by an exploding prop during a 1919 photo shoot, Lloyd was wise to mount the façade on a platform fitted over a lower roof and use camera angles and forced perspectives to create an exaggerated sense of height. He was still several storeys up, with only a mattress on a platform some 20 feet below to break a fall. But Bill Strother and a nameless circus acrobat did the really dangerous stuff, which was kept quiet by the terms of Lloyd’s contract.

Having graduated from ebullient everymen to all-action heroes, Douglas Fairbanks came to define silent screen swashbuckling, hence Michel Hazanavicius’s tribute in The Artist (2011). He was also the inspiration for Superman after doing a one-handed handspring during a duel in The Three Musketeers (1921), running up the chain of a rising drawbridge in Robin Hood (1922), and bouncing between giant jars in The Thief of Bagdad (1924). 

Fairbanks received occasional stunting assistance from Charles Lewis. But, at 43, he still had the athleticism to skim down two sails in Albert Parker’s Technicolor adventure on the point of a shearing dagger. Positioned at 45 degrees, the pre-torn canvases had been loosely stitched for the illusion, while a counterweighting pulley was used to control Fairbanks’s descent speed. Richard Donner borrowed the idea for The Goonies (1985). But no one has yet emulated the same film’s underwater ambush, with its gymnastic climax, as Fairbanks is lifted through the decks by his trusty cohorts.

Former rodeo champion Yakima Canutt headlines this pulsating Fred Jackman western in which a wild colt is reunited with the boy from whom he had been separated years before during a wagon train raid. Canutt was thrilled to land the human lead, although he was billed below Rex, ‘The Wonder Horse’. The black Morgan stallion had killed a man before being sold to producer Hal Roach, and Canutt had to have his left wrist and ankles lashed to him in case he bucked on camera. 

Rex had behaved stoically while rescuing Canutt from a raging torrent. But, while shooting a battle scene near the Little Bighorn River, Rex lost his temper and charged Canutt and attempted to bite his neck and trample him. Thankfully, Canutt survived to create iconic stunts for Stagecoach (1939) and Ben-Hur (1959) and become the first stunt performer to receive an Oscar, albeit an honorary one.

Buster Keaton loved trains and had created gags around them in Our Hospitality and Sherlock Jr. Armed with a budget of $400,000, he could indulge his passion to the full in this adaptation of engineer William Pittenger’s civil war memoir, The Great Locomotive Chase. While the scale of the sequences involving the vintage steam locomotives The General and The Texas is often impressive, Keaton found also time for more intimate moments with engines, which he’d borrowed from the Oregon, Pacific and Eastern Railroad. 

Having bobbed up and down on the coupling rod of a wheel while lost in thought about his beloved, Keaton hurls a heavy wooden beam while riding the cowcatcher in order to remove another blocking the track. But the landmark moment, devised with technical director Fred Gabourie, required six cameras to record an engine and its tender plunging into a ravine from a burning bridge in a $42,000 stunt that set an unbroken record for the silent era.

For his death scene in William A. Wellman’s Oscar-winning classic, Frank Clarke had to fly to 6,000 feet, operate a camera, spew chocolate sauce to show he had been shot, and unleash a smoke trail from his tailspinning German plane. He had it easy, however. Fellow war veteran Dick Grace’s speciality was crashing aircraft. To make things slightly safer, he sawed the wings and fitted fuselage sections that broke away on impact, when a spring-loaded safety belt would absorb the shock. 

Yet, the odd stunt didn’t go to plan. Grace was nearly impaled after hitting a hardwood post instead of a balsa breakaway when flipping his plane on ditching near a trench. Then, when the landing gear of the dogfighting Fokker he was crashing failed to buckle on impact, the force caused Grace’s harness to snap and he broke his neck and four vertebrae on smashing into the control panel. Later surviving both a stint commanding his own Squadron of Death stunt troupe and World War II bombing missions, Grace defiantly lived into his mid-sixties.

There’s a wry irony in the fact that the most memorable stunt performed by someone who had spent his career hurtling around and being flung hither and thither required him to stand stock still. Had he moved, the falling three-storey house façade with its open attic window would have crushed Buster Keaton. However, he and trusted co-ordinator Fred Gabourie had meticulously calculated the mid-cyclone collapse and driven a nail into the precise spot where the clown had to be positioned. 

He had trialled the gag in Back Stage (1919) and One Week (1920), and Jackie Chan and Steve McQueen respectively recreated it in Project A, Part II (1987) and Deadpan (1997). Credit must be given to the set builders, as the breakaway retained its integrity in flopping forwards. Given he had just been informed that his production company was going to be disbanded, there’s genuine poignancy in the sight of Keaton standing stoically as his world topples around him.

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