I'll wager few of you are familiar with Charles Hutchison but he was kind of the Jackie Chan of silent movies. He started in films around 1914 when he was 35 years old, which seems late in life to begin a career doing dangerous stunts. As it happens, though all the promotion for his "Hutch" serials like Hurricane Hutch and Lightning Hutch swore that he performed all his own feats, most film historians think doubles were often employed. One source says Hutchison didn't employ stuntmen at first but after several injuries to his arms, it became necessary.
Anyway, he appeared in daredevil films for about ten years, then segued to less strenuous roles and to (mostly) directing and screenwriting. He died in 1949 and his last known film work was a non-stunt appearance in the 1944 Captain America serial.
Many of his films exist today only because John Hampton, the proprietor of the Silent Movie Theater here in L.A., found prints of them in the attic of some old, long-closed theater in the Mid-West. When Hampton ran them at his theater in the sixties, that may have been the first time they'd been projected since talkies were invented.
You can't really see him in these excerpts but Mr. Hutchison was a stiff, unimpressive looking man who was pretty boring when he (that is, allegedly he) wasn't diving from a great height into a lake or leaping from a moving train. In each chapter of his serials, he either did something like that or looked like he was about to — and you'd have to come back next week to see him actually do it.
It's been a long time since I've seen a "Hutch" film but I do recall a couple of outright cheats, not in the deeds but in the coverage of them. At the end of Chapter 8, you'd see him drive his car off a cliff and it would crash on the rocks below indicating certain death for its driver. At the beginning of Chapter 9, they'd start with the same footage…only this time, there'd be an insert shot of Hutch bailing out of the car just before it went over. Audiences at the Silent Movie Theater who'd seen both chapters would sit there and boo the long-deceased Charles Hutchison.
Here he is in action. Or maybe some of this is his stunt doubles in action…