The Stunt Legend: Yakima Canutt

When veteran stuntman Yakima Canutt joined Where Eagles Dare in late 1967, he was seventy-two and already a legend. The former rodeo champion had doubled for John Wayne and designed the chariot race in Ben-Hur.

“He was as tough as nails and twice as sharp,” said director Brian G. Hutton.

Canutt was hired to supervise all second-unit action—explosions, bridge collapses, vehicle chases, and the vertigo-inducing cable-car battles. Despite his age, he worked on the freezing Austrian slopes as if born there.

“God, what a character,” Hutton recalled. “One of the great moments of my life was getting to work with him.”

To build his team, Canutt and his son-in-law Tom Ditto, acting as stunt coordinator, held auditions in London. From dozens of applicants they selected Britain’s finest: Joe Powell, Eddie Powell (Clint Eastwood’s double), Peter Brace, Jack Cooper, Doug Robinson, Terry York, and Gillian Aldam, who doubled Mary Ure. The only outsider was Alf Joint, recruited after Burton’s make-up artist showed the star a photograph of him.

“He looks just like Richard,” Burton laughed—and the resemblance proved uncanny.

Canutt’s working style was direct.

“He didn’t talk theory,” recalled Joint. “He’d just say, ‘You get a lick, he gets a lick.’”

His practical genius lay in using real physics instead of trick shots: cables hidden in shadows, weighted dummies, and balanced rigs.

The chaotic realism of Where Eagles Dare—the sense that anything might explode at any moment—was his trademark.
Although he often clashed with younger directors, Canutt and Hutton got along effortlessly.

“He knew what he was doing, and I let him do it,” Hutton said.

The admiration was mutual. After finishing the film, Canutt called it “the best-run picture I ever worked on outside Ben-Hur.”
His work gave the production its heartbeat. Every bullet hit, every collapsing bridge, carried his stamp of authenticity.
Audiences might not know his name, but they felt his presence. The man who had revolutionized the western reinvented the war film one more time—on a mountaintop in Austria.