Peter O Toole in Richard Rush s The Stunt Man
Credit: 20th Century Fox
The passing of Richard Rush, the writer-director who died last week aged 91, strikes me as the epitaph to something – a certain era of risk-taking in American cinema. His career is one of Hollywood’s great might-have-beens. According to Variety, he gave away the rights to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and turned down Jaws. In the last 40 years, he was only responsible for one film, and that was his worst – the dilapidated Bruce Willis erotic thriller Color of Night (1994), about which the less said the better.