Falls can range from a tumble down a flight of stairs to a plunge from the top of a high building.
For high falls, giant nylon air bags, which inflate to the area of a living room, are used to cushion the impact, as in Jerry Hewitt’s plummet from an exploding ski lift in The Soldier (1982).
Before air bags were introduced in 1971, stacks of cardboard cartons covered with mattress served the purpose. These were then covered by tarpaulin and roped together. One layer of boxes for every 10ft (3m) of fall was the standard procedure.
When the Olympic swimming gold medallist Johnny Weissmuller – the cinema’s popular to dive off Brooklyn Bridge in Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942), there were rumours that the actor actually did the 110ft (33m) plunge. But it was a trick. Weissmuller dived into a tank of water – then the film cut to a shot of a dummy plummeting off the bridge.
In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), a leap to freedom from a cliff into a raging torrent was also faked. The actors Paul Newman and Robert Redford simply jumped onto a small platform a few feet below the cliff edge. Then two stuntmen were filmed jumping 72ft (22m) into a California lake.
Until about 1960, 60ft (18m) was the maximum unaided high fall. But modern stuntmen now fail more than 100ft (300m) – using low-level parachute rigs and ‘descender wires.’
The American stuntmen Dar Robinson specialised in spectacular falls. He developed a technique of doing head-first falls from high buildings on a thin wire – a ‘deceleration cable’ – attached to a harness under his clothes. A winch slowed the fall as he neared the ground, bringing him to a halt, hanging upside down, a few feet up.
In Highpoint (filmed in 1979), Robinson, doubling for Christopher Plummer, fell from the CN Tower in Toronto – at 1815ft (553m), the world’s highest free standing building. He plunged the equivalent of 120 storeys before making a delayed parachute descent. Robinson was killed seven years later, at the age of 39, while riding home on a motorcycle.
Picture Credit : Google