MOVIES IN AMERICA were once just cheap popular amusement--you'd put in a penny, turn the crank, and get your kicks. People soon discovered that movies could amount to a great deal more than just entertainment, but there has always been a plain, visceral fascination in the play of image and color on acetate in a dark room.

In The Stunt Man Richard Rush succeeds breathtakingly in infecting his audience with the fun of movies; the movie rollicks on its way at an exhilirating pace, crammed full of playful action, hair-raising stunts and cinematic fiddling. Unfortunately--perhaps for fear of not being in some way Significant--Rush strives too hard for more and flaws a most remarkable film. In his anxiousness not to be merely entertaining, Rush injects overblown and spurious material that interferes with the pure amusement of the spectacle--as if there were something so mere about good entertainment that the filmmaker has to go out of his way to drape it in places with solemn purple robes of meaning.

Rush couldn't begin with a more promising subject for film treatment. An enigmatic young Vietnam vet (Steve Railsback) is on the run from the police for some unknown crime. A near brush with death in his desperate escape from arrest brings him into the distorted movie-set world of a flamboyant, god-like director (Peter O'Toole) and his company on location near San Diego. The company's star stunt man has been killed and the arrest must be temporarily concealed; the fugitive needs a refuge until the heat is off. The director has seen that this hard-bitten desperado was indirectly responsible for his stunt man's death, and, suggesting to Railsback that his options are a bit limited, offers the fugitive the dead stunt man's role for $600 a stunt. The fugitive takes to his job well until he begins to suspect that he may be slated as another victim of the director's madcap art.

This is the premise of a classic thriller: a man without a past trying to survive in a house-of-mirrors world ruled by a manic, eloquent, grandly eccentric genius, a kind of prankish, omnipotent deity. But this is not enough for Rush. In its jumbled hyperactive way The Stunt Man is part corny romantic comedy, part whoop-it-up action exploitation flick, and high-brow, somewhat pretentious anti-war statement (circa Vietnam) and quickie-metaphysical study of Paranoia, Art, and the old Illusion/Reality enigma. The Stunt Man's got it all, even those big, capitalized questions of Significance, which flutter like damp fortune-cookie slogans blowing around in the whirl wind of the movie's frenetic action. There is too much.

Yet The Stunt Man never comes close to being the trashy, indulgent mess it could easily have been. The movie is rescued by its director's brilliant gamesmanship; Richard Rush is a brilliant trickster who can bring a magical, dancing glow even to lackluster materials. Despite all the superfluous innuendos of Meaning, the impotent love story, the seductive but empty-headed banality of the lady-star (Barbara Hershey), and a screenplay that at times suggests that talkies were a big mistake, Rush has created a nerve-tingling celluloid magic show. Rush is a master of the infinite details of the surface, the colored smokes of movie-making, the actual play of images on the acetate. The wholly superficial brilliance of Rush's direction is enough to make The Stunt Man a rare thrill.

The Stunt Man is a catalogue of optical stunts, editing stunts, camera stunts. Rush is always present playing little tricks, making a subliminal point with a telling camera angle, making some point (often lost on the viewer) with a shock cut to another scene. And he always makes sure you know he's there. We see the god-director Eli Gross flying around in a camera crane high against a bright blue sky, making grand proclamations in his Shakespearian high camp, and when he blows a bubble with his gum it pops with an immediate cut to the thunderous roar of a war scene on the movie set. Rush has the rare ability to lift the viewer bodily from his seat with a shift of perspective, to paralyse the metabolism with a twist of the zoom lens.

All this cinematographic sleight of hand would begin to irritate as hyperactive, empty artifice if it weren't for Rush's high-speed approach. The movie hurtles along with a careless, rowdy exuberance for life and the fun of movies. Rush keeps the show moving busily forward, accompanied by a giddy, carnival-like ragtime score; we don't have time to puzzle the enigmas that teem in such overabundance, but at the same time we never have time to pin down the petty annoyances. Rush's eclectic style can careen between screwball frolic and murky psychodrama with the naive self-assurance of a precocious school boy. Like his stunt man protagonist, he stumbles again and again; but each time he falls flat he bounces up grinning to rush off for more.

THE STUNT MAN'S other saving grace, besides the sheer energy of Rush's technical imagination, is Peter O'Toole's madcap caricature of a visionary movie director. Things spring magically to life when he strides into the picture, all self-centered, self-conscious magnificence and deified idiosyncrasy. None of the other caricatures have near his stature and wit; indeed Rush makes them all cower in the shadows of his imperious ego, and even then he's always descending from his helicopter into their privacy or shining spotlights into their midnight trysts. He is a perverse god; he loves making grand entrances, sweeping everyone into line within his great play, dominating everyone's lives and letting them know he knows what they're thinking and who they're sleeping with. He's a magnificent, Shakespearean son of a bitch.

For all its tangential pretensions and clutter, The Stunt Man never forgets the cheap pleasures of the funhouse, and in this fundamental modesty it becomes something unique. The simple high spirits of the ferris wheel save The Stunt Man from a pathetic failure. This film falls into the great American tradition of roguish, exploitative entertainment. This is a movie of sequins and comic strip naivete, of the three-ring circus. And Rush is a dazzling ringmaster.