In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
The Criterion Collection is not big on sports dramas, but they do have one of the best winter sports films of all time—Downhill Racer, the film debut of TV director Michael Ritchie, with a screenplay by James Salter loosely based on Oakley Hall’s novel The Downhill Racers. The title shift is significant–this is a story about one ski racer, with everyone else serving as backdrop. It’s a good way to get in the mood for the Winter Olympics, since there’s a lot of skiing in this film, much of it taking place on Alpine courses. There’s also a narrative that sounds familiar—a small-town American trying to make his way in a field where his kind is definitely not the norm—but which is presented in a most unconventional manner.
Downhill Racer begins not with the thrill of victory but with the agony of defeat, as we see an unidentified skier in Team USA gear wipe out during a downhill race. He’s stretchered off the course and onto a medical helicopter, and at the hospital an X-ray reveals a nasty-looking fracture that we can conclude means the end of his season. One man’s misfortune proves to be another’s opportunity, however, because team coach Eugene Claire (Gene Hackman) calls up as a replacement David Chappellet (Robert Redford), whose distinctive shearling jacket doesn’t quite conceal the sizeable chip on his shoulder.
After refusing to compete in one race due to an unfavorable starting number (meaning the course would be slow and filled with ruts by the time he got to ski), Chappellet is given a similar number for the next race but surprises everyone by coming in fourth. Then he wipes out in the season’s final race and it’s back to the United States for off-season training.
Returning home to his family’s modest Colorado farm, Chappellet doesn’t exactly get a hero’s welcome. In fact, after thanking him for the stamps on the postcards he sent from Europe, his father (Walter Stroud) doesn’t have much to say besides asking him why he’s wasting his life on skiing. Chappellet drops by to see his old girlfriend Lena (Carole Carle), but they fail to connect in any but the most obvious physical way. By now it’s plain to see why Chappellet is out for himself on the ski slopes—no one else has ever had his best interests at heart and if he wants more than life on a hardscrabble farm or in a dead-end small town he’ll have to go out and get it for himself.
There are more races (the footage is a mix of real races and purpose-shot material, resulting in some bloopers that aren’t really important), more victories and defeats, and more pretty blondes, along with occasional discussions of strategy and teamwork, all leading up to the Olympics. Redford’s personality is what holds it all together, although his character is definitely not a conventional hero in the sense that you’d encourage a kid to grow up to be like him. Yes he’s talented on the slopes, and yes his good looks and charm are undeniable, but Chappellet isn’t a standard-issue Hollywood good guy. Instead, he’s explicitly out for himself, both in terms of winning races and in getting endorsements based on his athletic success, and expresses a rather callous attitude toward anyone who isn’t as successful as he wants to be.
The narrative of Downhill Racer is easy to follow but the cinematic style of Ritchie is unusual, at least for popular dramas. It features lots of abrupt cuts spanning big jumps in time and place, with a minimum of connecting material, while interactions among characters are stripped down to their shortest possible length as if to say “well, now that we’ve established that point, time to move on.” It’s a trip seeing what European travel, and skiing, was like in the late 1960s, to say nothing of television cameras, and between the actors and the locations there’s eye candy aplenty. But the reason this film is highly esteemed among cinephiles is the unconventional approach Ritchie took to what could have been a run-of-the-mill sports drama. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 494
Technical details: 102 min.; color; screen ratio 1.85:1; English.
Edition reviewed: DVD (1 disc).
Extras: video interview with Robert Redford and novelist/screenwriter James Salter; video interview with production manager Walter Coblenz, editor Richard Harris, and cameraman/stunt double/technical adviser Joe Jay Jalbert; audio excerpts from an American Film Institute seminar featuring director Michael Ritchie; promotional short “How Fast?” narrated by Redford; illustrated booklet with an essay by film critic Todd McCarthy.
Fun Fact: It’s understandable that a film aimed at American audiences would feature an American character in the lead, because business is business. The historical reality is that from 1948 through 1976 every male downhill skiing Olympic medal was won by an athlete from Europe and the first American on the podium in that event was Bill Johnson at the 1984 Sarajevo Games. Americans fared slightly better in the slalom, with Billy Kidd (who may have been a model for Redford’s character) winning silver at the Innsbruck Games in 1964.
Parting Thought: Gene Hackman is on record as saying he felt like a “high-priced extra” on this film as it gives him so little to do. He does get one significant speech, in which he argues for the values of consistency and well-roundedness against Redford’s view that all that’s worth considering is who’s on the podium and who isn’t. Hackman’s character is clearly supposed to be the good guy here, but in the world of high-powered international competition, is he being naïve? More significantly, is that attitude why Americans weren’t really a force to be reckoned with in Alpine skiing until well after this picture was made?
