In praise of Yakima Canutt

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.”…