With the Winter Olympics in full swing, what better way for a cineaste to celebrate than watching "Downhill Racer"?
This 1969 movie, reissued by Criterion, stars a 32- year-old Robert Redford as a hotshot loner who makes the U.S. Olympic ski team. Shot in such legendary Alpine locations as Wengen, Switzerland and Kitzbuhel, Austria, it remains the finest fiction film about skiing ever made.
Not that there have been many. The project came about because, as Redford says during an interview for a DVD extra, there had never been a good skiing drama. As producer as well as star, he was attracted to "the combination of poetry and danger" in the sport.
To convey the immediacy of downhill skiing, director Michael Ritchie attached lightweight cameras to stunt skiers as they skimmed the slopes at speeds often exceeding 50 miles per hour. For retakes, new locations had to be found since the track marks on the already filmed slopes rendered them unusable.
In "Downhill Racer," what you see is what you get; there are no computer effects, no fakery. We share the skier's point of view. We hear every whoosh and scrape. When a skier wipes out on the slopes, it's the real deal. Watching this film, I often felt like I should be wearing a helmet.
Redford's Skiing
This was Ritchie's first film. He went on to direct Redford in "The Candidate" and subsequently made such sports-themed hits as "The Bad News Bears" and "Semi- Tough." His edgy, hand-held camerawork proved ideal for the project, even though Redford's first choice was Roman Polanski. Polanski, an avid skier, ended up directing "Rosemary's Baby," a movie about a very different kind of slippery slope.
A top-notch skier himself, Redford (who does some of his own stunts in the film) originally intended "Downhill Racer" as the first in a trilogy of movies about winning. Certainly "The Candidate," where he plays a golden boy U.S. Senate hopeful, looks like a continuation of the win-at- all-costs scenario. In both movies the victor played by Redford is forced at the very end to conclude: "What now?"
Kidd, Sabich
Novelist James Salter was hired by Redford to write "Downhill Racer" despite, or perhaps, because he knew very little about skiing. His script is impressionistic and elusive -- what an earlier generation might have termed Hemingwayesque. Salter hung out with champion skiers, among them Billy Kidd and "Spider" Sabich, absorbing their lingo and their go-go temperaments.
Redford's character, David Chappellet, was fashioned in late 1960s antihero mode. Chappellet is a heel who cares only about victory. When asked by a reporter what his post- Olympics plans are, he can only say, "This is it." He skis to be famous, to be a champion. When pressed by his coach, played by Gene Hackman, to be a team player, Chappellet replies, "It's not exactly a team sport, is it?"
In another DVD-extra interview, Salter says he wanted Chappellet to be "an outsider who comes in," but the skier remains resolutely diffident throughout. I mean this as a compliment. Redford's performance, one of his earliest and best, is bracingly unsentimental.
Vancouver Hoopla
This lack of sentimentality may also be why "Downhill Racer" wasn't a hit. Seen today, its uncompromising quality makes it seem up-to-the-minute. Only one concession was made: Salter's original script had Chappellet losing the big race. As Redford explains, that plot twist would have wiped out the audience.
Still, "Downhill Racer" is a perfect antidote to all that hoopla coming from Vancouver.