Buddy Van Horn was Clint Eastwood's stunt double and coordinator for more than forty years, and directed three of his films when asked. The fights are clear, heavy and real; the scenes between them are left to look after themselves, and mostly they do not.
Fi1m perspective
When somebody is hit in a Buddy Van Horn film, you can see who threw the punch, who took it and where he landed. That sounds like a low bar and it is one many directors fail to clear. In Any Which Way You Can (1980), his first feature, the fights are clear and heavy, thrown by men who look as though they could, and they are the best-handled thing in the film. Everything else, the songs, the bikers, the orang-utan, is left to find its own way out of the scene, and most of it wanders.
He came to directing late and sideways. He had been a horseman and a stunt performer since the early 1950s, doubling Guy Williams on the Zorro television series and, at various times, Gregory Peck and James Stewart. From 1967 he was Clint Eastwood's double, and from the early 1970s his stunt coordinator and second-unit director at Malpaso, on Dirty Harry (1971) and after. He looked enough like Eastwood to be cast as the dead marshal in High Plains Drifter (1973). Three directing credits followed, all Eastwood pictures: Any Which Way You Can, The Dead Pool (1988) and Pink Cadillac (1989). Asked how the second came about, he said: "Clint just said, 'Have a look at the script. If you like it, you can direct it.' I liked it."
That is a stuntman's account of directing, and the films are a stuntman's films. The action is done in front of the camera rather than with optical effects, and it is organised and efficient; Jack N. Green shot The Dead Pool, and it is the action that film is remembered for. The reviews at the time said of it roughly what we said of the first: good when something is moving, thin when it is not. Some also wondered how much of the directing was Van Horn's and how much his producer and star's, which is unkind but not unreasonable when every film a man directs has the same lead and the same company behind it.
We will admit it: we sat forward for every fight in Any Which Way You Can and looked at the clock during everything between them, and we think that is the right response to the film rather than a failure of patience. Put it beside Bronco Billy, which Eastwood directed himself the same year and which has an idea about a man and his audience, and the gap is plain. One is a film. The other is a cast list with some excellent punches in it.
He went back to the job he was best at and stayed there, coordinating stunts on Eastwood's films until J. Edgar (2011). Watch his three features for the set pieces and do not expect much around them. For the rest of what he did, look further down the credits of almost anything Eastwood made over more than forty years; his name is there, and so is his work.
Biography
Buddy Van Horn, also credited as Wayne Van Horn, was an American stunt coordinator, second unit director and film director. He directed three Clint Eastwood films: Any Which Way You Can (1980), The Dead Pool (1988) and Pink Cadillac (1989).
Van Horn worked extensively with Eastwood from the late 1960s, serving as his stunt double and as stunt coordinator on more than thirty films up to J. Edgar (2011). Earlier in his career he doubled for Guy Williams on the Disney television series Zorro and for actors including Gregory Peck. He was sometimes credited under his birth name in the 1980s.
