GATORS AT 100

No Stunt: Van Sickel Was Legend At UF And In Film

By ANDY STAPLES

Published: Jul 10, 2006

GAINESVILLE - Man, that guy could drive.

Surely, the engineers who designed the 1970 Plymouth Valiant - three-speed manual transmission, 198-horsepower slant-six engine - never intended for it to be driven the way Dale Van Sickel drove it in the 1971 thriller "Duel." Of course, those engineers never got chased by a rampaging tanker truck from hell.

When first-time director Steven Spielberg needed shots of that cherry-red Valiant tooling along a lonely highway, he let star Dennis Weaver drive. But when Spielberg needed that Valiant to spin out, careen into a split-rail fence or to slam into the side of a mountain, he put Van Sickel behind the wheel.

Spielberg's star had yet to rise when he directed the Hitchcock-with-road-rage fantasy, but Van Sickel already was a legend in two fields. In Hollywood, Van Sickel built his name staging fights, crashing cars and playing anonymous henchmen as one of the movie industry's pioneering stuntmen. Back east, he was better known as the University of Florida's first truly great football player.

How great? Van Sickel was the best player on the best team in the first 75 years of Florida football. The do-it-all end teamed with ambidextrous - hands and feet - Clyde Crabtree to help lead the Gators to the 1928 NCAA scoring title (336 points) and to within one point of a berth in the Rose Bowl to play for the national title.

That season, Van Sickel was the first Gator named a first-team All-American. Also that year, according to The Florida Alligator, the curly locked junior was named the most handsome man on the UF campus.

That probably explains why, two years later, the brother-in-law of actor Humphrey Bogart approached the freshly graduated Van Sickel - then a Florida football assistant - with a tip.

You ought to be in pictures.

"It sounded interesting," Van Sickel told The Tampa Tribune in a 1975 interview, "and I went to New York and took a screen test."

In his first role, Van Sickel played the Army football captain in 1931's "The Spirit of Notre Dame." He would go on to work with the Marx brothers ("Duck Soup"), George Reeves ("Adventures of Superman"), Abbott and Costello ("Abbott and Costello Go to Mars") and Alfred Hitchcock ("North by Northwest").

According to the Internet Movie Database, Van Sickel has more than 200 acting credits and more than 100 stunt credits. Those numbers probably aren't even close to accurate, because stunt performers often didn't receive credit for their work in the early days of Hollywood, Chuck Hicks said.

Hicks should know. He had several fistfights with Van Sickel in the 1960s - for the movies, of course.

Hicks, now 80, said that by the time he entered the movie business, Van Sickel was one of the industry's most respected stuntmen.

"He was a gentleman," Hicks said. "That's for sure."

Hicks said when Van Sickel staged a fight, he made the younger stuntmen feel as if they were in control. And Van Sickel, a former boxer, was a master at stage combat.

To see some of his better fighting work, rent the 1965 comedy "The Great Race" and pay special attention to the bar-brawl scene.

"We broke everything in that bar," Hicks said with a laugh. "Everything that could be broken, we broke it."

Though he worked on such classics as "Spartacus," not all of Van Sickel's films were big-budget blockbusters. He performed in plenty of western serials and did his share of science-fiction schlock. He even got a nod on the ultimate B-movie-geek television show, "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

"Dale Van Sickel!" character Crow yelled after spotting Van Sickel in a "Commando Cody" short. "He never made a bad film!"

Van Sickel's experience is why another movie geek used him in his feature-film debut. In the director's commentary of the "Duel" DVD, Spielberg recalled the thrill of getting Van Sickel and stunt director Carey Loftin (who drove the tanker) on board for the 13-day shoot.

"Carey Loftin and Dale Van Sickel … were two of the best-known stuntmen in the annals of Hollywood history," Spielberg said.

Current stuntmen also may know Van Sickel as the man who helped earn them more respect and more money when he helped form the Stuntmen's Association of Motion Pictures in 1961. Van Sickel served as the organization's first president.

Though stuntmen have splintered into several organizations in recent years, the Stuntmen's Association helped professionalize the trade, bringing more money and improved safety standards for stuntmen.

Van Sickel was semi-retired in March 1975 when he learned he would be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. He hadn't completely given up the movie business, though.

"I can stay as busy as I want to," he said a few days after learning of the honor.

Three months later, Van Sickel was on the set of Walt Disney Pictures' "No Deposit, No Return." The stunt required Van Sickel to drive a car off an oil-slicked wharf, but something went wrong.

The car skidded and crashed into an abutment. Van Sickel suffered critical injuries. His coach at Florida, Charles Bachman, stood in for him at the Hall of Fame induction. Van Sickel died of his injuries in January 1977.

But thanks to the movies, Van Sickel's memory will live on forever.

He'll be there every time the brawlers break up that bar in "The Great Race." He'll be there every time a film fan scanning the video-store shelf, says, "Hey, this looks interesting," and takes home "Duel" to watch that evil tanker chase the All-American in the red Plymouth Valiant.

Reporter Andy Staples can be reached at (352) 262-3719 or astaples@tampatrib.com.