Remember the desert chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indy leaps from a galloping horse onto a Nazi truck? And how he gets knocked over the hood, drags along underneath, and swings up onto the back? Awesome! And poignant. Turns out those stunts were done in homage to an old cowboy who was fixin' to ride off into the sunset. Fella by the name of Yakima Canutt.
Born on a ranch in the Snake River Hills of Washington, Canutt was a rodeo champ turned silent-movie star in the 1920s. Unfortunately, when he opened his mouth he sounded like a real cowboy—or "a hillbilly in a well," as he lamented. With the advent of talkies in the late '20s, his days as a leading man were over.
Like any smart worker made redundant by new technology, Canutt did a personal skills inventory. He decided that what he could offer—and what Hollywood needed—was to bring more "excitement and thrills" to the silver screen. "I realized that so much more could be done," he recalled in his autobiography. He envisioned a whole new job description "in the action end of the motion picture industry."
In other words, he would become something unheard of at the time: a professional, full-time "stuntman."
The timing was perfect. It was the golden age of Westerns, and Canutt soon established himself as the guy in Hollywood for jaw-dropping action. The flying leap from horseback emulated in Raiders? That was vintage Canutt as a marauding Apache in Stagecoach. (And when the Ringo Kid shoots the Apache and jumps onto the runaway team, leaping from horse to horse? Canutt again, changing costumes to play both sides of the fight.) The under-the-vehicle stunt was a signature move, done with a backflip for good measure in Zorro's Fighting Legion. (See a clip below.)
Impressive stuff? Just ask Terry Leonard, the legendary stuntman who doubled Harrison Ford in Raiders. Leonard had already tried to duplicate the under-the-wagon trick in 1981's The Legend of the Lone Ranger—and had gotten run over. Then, on the set of Raiders, as he was about to jump onto that Nazi truck, the horse panicked and threw him in front of the rear wheels. He managed to roll out of the way, but at the time, Leonard says, all he could think was, "Son of a bitch, here we go again."
In the 1930s, Canutt doubled all the big action stars of his day—Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Roy Rogers. He was Clark Gable driving a wagon through the flames in Gone With the Wind. But above all, in dozens of films, he was John Wayne—and vice versa: The Duke credited Canutt as the model for his own onscreen cowboy persona, hip-shot walk, drawling speech, and all. Rarely one to gush, Wayne once said of his lifelong pal, "Yakima Canutt is the most magnificent man I ever met."
Canutt didn't just perform the stunts—or "gags," as he called them—he dreamed them up, figured out how to film them, and invented the rigging and techniques that made them possible. Having earned his spurs in the wild frontier days of filmmaking, when people died doing stunts that didn't even look like much, Canutt made movie action both safer and more spectacular. "He was the first to make a science of it," says Vic Armstrong, the guy who did the tricky stuff for Harrison Ford in the later Indiana Jones films (leaping from a horse onto a Nazi tank in The Last Crusade). "Yakima Canutt was the daddy of us all—the greatest there's ever been."
Of course, to modern eyes those early Westerns can look campy. Real cowboys don't get on a horse by leapfrogging from behind (the "crupper mount" that Canutt introduced and which became a much-parodied cliché of the genre). But it was an era that had little need for realism in film. His exuberant stunts—like driving a wagon off a cliff into a lake to escape the bad guys—set the mold not only for today's gritty, revisionist Westerns but also for our over-the-top, laugh-out-loud action movies.
Tough hombre that he was, by the early 1940s injuries had taken their toll. Doubling Clark Gable in Boom Town, Canutt had a horse fall backwards on top of him, forcing the saddle horn through his abdomen and severing his intestines. In 1943, a mountainside leap from the saddle went awry when his horse swerved away from the safety net. He snapped both legs at the ankles.
Enough was enough. Moving behind the camera, Canutt went on to establish himself as a top stunt coordinator and second-unit director, handling the action scenes in epics like Ivanhoe, Spartacus, El Cid, and Where Eagles Dare. He staged the spectacular chariot race in Ben-Hur—with son Joe Canutt doubling Charlton Heston—and the goofy ostrich race in Swiss Family Robinson. When he finally retired in 1976, Yakima Canutt was on his fourth career, any one of which would have been more than enough for most of us. But when he won his lifetime Oscar in 1966, it was, in the words of the Academy, simply for "creating the profession of stuntman as it exists today."
So next time you're enjoying a thrilling action scene—like, say, in Cowboys & Aliens, when the hero leaps from a horse onto an alien spacecraft—tip your hat to the old cowboy who made it all possible.
