Downhill Racer (1969)

It's not exactly a team sport, is it?

In 1968, Robert Redford wasn’t quite Robert Redford. The thirty-two-year-old had won a couple of decent supporting roles in This Property is Condemned and The Chase (both 1966), but it wasn’t until Barefoot in the Park (1967) that he enjoyed both leading man status and a bona fide hit. Even then, he’d missed out on two of the potentially biggest roles of his career thus far – as Nick in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1968).¹ His next movie was due to be Blue, playing the adopted son of a Mexican bandit, but Redford used the success of Barefoot to impose two conditions: the shoot had to take place near his home in Utah, and he requested script rewrites. The first was agreed; the second didn’t happen, so Redford exercised his right to hit the bricks.²

Paramount was not happy, slapping Redford with a $235,000 law suit. For Redford, it was an exciting wake-up call: “They throw that word ‘star’ at you loosely, and they take it away loosely if your pictures flops. You take responsibility for their crappy movie, that’s all it means. So what I said was, since you say I’m responsible if my name’s above the title, then give me responsibility. That’s all.” If he was important enough to sue, he was important enough to take his career into his own hands.

As part of the settlement, Redford agreed to do two films for Paramount for a combined fee of $65,000. The first was a loaner – the Universal production of Tell Them Willie Boy is Here – and the second an adaptation of Oakley Hall’s 1963 novel The Downhill Racers, initially earmarked as Roman Polanski’s American directorial debut. Both Polanski and producer Robert Evans would end up focusing on Rosemary’s Baby as a better fit for Polanski’s talents, leaving the ski picture in the wind. Where others might have shrugged and moved on, Redford saw the chance to make a movie on his own terms, and so approached newly-minted Paramount head Charles Bluhdorn with a proposition: he would take over The Downhill Racers through his own production company and make the movie for less than $2 million.

Bluhdorn, never a man to turn down a bargain, gave Redford the green light, which immediately sparked the star’s ambition: “For Downhill the first thing was to get rid of Oakley Hall’s source novel, which was après-ski stuff. I decided I wanted to examine the illusion of greatness in winning at all costs.” Naturally, this wasn’t what Bluhdorn would be looking for – Redford was a leading man, it was going to be a ski-romance, yes? – so Redford went out of his way to assemble compelling test footage to show that this was more than a standard cuddles-in-the-snow picture: he headed out to Grenoble with a cameraman and a bunch of ski bums to grab some ski footage, which was then supplemented by some tricksy low-budget work in Los Angeles to insert Redford.³ It worked: Bluhdorn was on board. Redford hired James Salter to work Hall’s book into the new, semi-documentary take on competitive sports.⁴

Downhill Racer is a sports drama in the sense that it is a drama about sport, but it eschews crowd-pleasing cliché for a kind of asceticism that fundamentally undermines any potential fist-pumping pleasure, to the point where it’s almost an anti-sports drama. Dave Chappellet (Redford) is a downhill skier who finds himself joining the American ski team after one of the team is injured. Chappellet is a loner jock, concerned more with his starting position and winning than he is with the team effort. Naturally, this grates with Coach Claire (Gene Hackman) – less so with Assistant Coach Mayo (Dabney Coleman)⁵ - and Chappellet’s teammates, but what could have been a standard “lone wolf learns the value of teamwork” story instead becomes a more caustic take on the emptiness of victory. Chappellet may have beaten the Austrian champ, but his win is potentially short-lived – a German challenger comes close to beating Chappellet’s time before crashing out – and his subsequent gold medal is more relief than triumph.

If this all feels a bit pointless and po-faced, it’s because it is, at least on paper. Downhill Racer is a character study of a man with no character: he exists to win, and his winning is pointless. Sure, he may be driven by paternal apathy – his farmer father is more interested in chicken wire than skiing – but Chappellet is never sympathetic enough to be excused by a dirt-poor upbringing. It’s a bold move on Redford’s part to be this invested in creating a character so utterly self-serving, but Redford was savvy enough to know his star quality would pull him through, and stacked the deck further by hiring Michael Ritchie as director.

Ritchie had caught Redford’s attention with his NBC pilot for The Outsider: “Redford hired me because he liked the documentary style that I had brought to some TV stuff. He wanted to do as documentary a film as Paramount would allow him.” This isn’t entirely true: Redford acknowledged Ritchie’s skills as a semi-documentarian, but he also recognised Ritchie as a fellow iconoclast and a first-time feature director who had almost as much to prove as Redford.

That kind of dedication would come in handy: the Lauberhorn shoot was hamstrung by On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which was being filmed on the mountain opposite, and which effectively stole their ideal crew. Ritchie had to train Washington University skier Joe Jay Jalbert to use a camera for the first-person footage: “Joe Jay had to learn to handle a fifteen-pound Arriflex while skiing downhill at full speed. It took forever to get a single, steady, usable shot.” Redford was also nursing both three months’ worth of saddle sores from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and injuries sustained in a snowmobile accident, which left him with a limp during the early part of the shoot: “A cheap way to get close-ups. All the while, of course, was the hovering suspicion that the gods were trying to tell us something.”

Luckily, Ritchie had a cast and crew committed to quick, documentary-style shooting. Both director of photography Brian Probyn and sound man Kevin Sutton had recently worked on Ken Loach’s Poor Cow (1967), while the cast were largely impervious to verité photography: “Gene has no star ego and doesn’t care how you photograph him. And Camilla [Sparv, playing the “love” interest Carole], like Bob, has classic beauty that you simple couldn’t shoot badly.” And the movie works best when it concentrates on verisimilitude. The skiing scenes are adeptly handled, contrasting the static, roaring crowd with the terrifyingly fast (and largely silent) first-person footage, and Ritchie has an eye for everyday quirks, most notably the moment where the American TV cameras focus on a guy who looks almost like Redford, before swiftly finding the man himself.⁶

The performances are also sound. Redford plays Chappellet with the ease of someone essentially ramping up his own nature: he is quietly uncompromising, bristling only when he isn’t the most powerful guy in the room (even if it’s just a lost point at table tennis), perpetually chewing gum, and doing that low-key jock thing of absently demonstrating his physical prowess, whether it’s stretching or testing the integrity of the hand-hold in a hospital room. Even his kissing scenes show him exercising power – yep, he’s a head-gripper, folks. Otherwise, he remains as aloof and self-centred as only a star can be, brushing off his hometown girlfriend with consummate ease once he’s had his way, and refusing to demonstrate vulnerability even when Carole (Camilla Sparv)⁷ gives him a taste of his own medicine. This would be insufferable were the film not so intent on arguing that Chappellet is a product of the sport industry, a man conditioned to smother any human feeling in the pursuit of gold and almost the polar opposite of an inspiration.

It would be even more insufferable if Downhill Racer didn’t feature Gene Hackman, who brings his everyman chuckle to Coach Claire, as well as providing an effective counter to Redford’s icy persona, particularly in a late confrontation between Claire and Chappellet. Where most movies would have the coach raging at Chappellet for endangering one of the team in a one-on-one race, Hackman plays the scene almost as quietly as Redford: this is a man who doesn’t need to shout. While Ritchie stated that “the only problems we had were over those scenes where Redford was supposed to leave Hackman bewildered and ploughed under,” Hackman’s strength is actually a bonus: as coach, he is actually the biggest dick in the room, despite what Chappellet might think. The only difference is that Hackman happens to be charming while he’s swinging it. If you were in any doubt, the final scene proves it: Claire pauses in his backslapping to check on the German challenger, implying that his celebration is predicated solely on an unequivocal win – we’re supposed to be with Chappellet at this moment, but Hackman steals it because, frankly, his is the more interesting character and the more interesting performance.

Such a chilly film was never likely to put bums on seats. Despite promises that previews of Downhill Racer wouldn’t be shown after a major release, Paramount decided to preview the film in Santa Barbara after a screening of Midnight Cowboy and it suffered. According to Redford, “Santa Barbara is a sunshine retirement haven for easterners and the U.S. military. People come to get away from the snow. In ten minutes I saw the audience wanted out. People began leaving.” I’m not surprised. Midnight Cowboy isn’t exactly a laugh-a-minute, and following one of the great downer endings with a hundred minutes of Redford as egotistical prick was hardly going to bring people round.

That said, critics largely appreciated Downhill Racer, praising Salter’s sometimes oblique script (the man hated connective tissue), with Roger Ebert calling it “the best movie ever made about sports – without really being about sports at all” and Andrew Sarris rightly acknowledging the film’s “negative fantasy” around winning. But appreciating the movie isn’t necessarily the same as liking it. While Downhill Racer’s insistence on unsympathetic characterisation and sabotage of sports movie cliché is undoubtedly laudable, there’s something oppressively cold about the film (beyond its snowy milieu) that stops it from being an unqualified success. It feels more like an intellectual exercise than a movie at times, more the equivalent of Salter’s terse prose work than Ritchie’s future filmography, despite Ritchie’s occasional cock-eyed (and human) moments. This is compounded by Redford’s now semi-laconic style, which would ultimately become part of his screen persona, probably most obvious in his near-mute role as “Our Man” in All Is Lost (2013). As such, the film’s existentialism can be alienating to the point of tedium if you don’t happen to be in the mood for it.

As it turned out, most cinemagoers weren’t in the mood, especially after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had given them the irresistible Redford-Newman one-two only a month earlier. Where that film made fun of its inconsequentiality, Downhill Racer hammered it home, and it would barely cover its budget. Redford shrugged it off later: “Really the films that I’ve wanted to make, and have really been behind, haven’t made much money. That’s the way it is. But you end up with the satisfaction of doing something that you have a kind of passion for.” For him, Downhill Racer was a minor setback on a longer road to artistic control. Meanwhile, Michael Ritchie had gotten his directorial debut out of the way, and was about to embark on one of the queasiest crime movies of the 1970s.

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Next Up: “Any way they slice it, it’s going to be murder.”

1. Mike Nichols: “He said he perfectly understood the character, who was a social misfit. I finally said to him, ‘Bob, you’re a vastly talented man. But be honest with yourself. Look in the mirror. Do it. And then tell me: Can you honestly imagine a guy like you having difficulty seducing a woman?’”

2. Blue would be released in 1968, with Terence Stamp in the Redford role. A ropey script, even ropier day-for-night photography, and a director out of his element meant that this one is rightly forgotten. Even Karl Malden can’t save it.

3. This apparently involved some low-angle shots, a motorcycle helmet painted silver, and cigarette smoke to mimic steaming breath. For an actor who always seems so controlled, it’s nice to see Redford going all low-budget on us.

4. Salter is, in many ways, a perfect Redford screenwriter. A firm believer in cutting the fat (and indeed some of the meat), Salter is one of those writers who makes Hemingway look like Henry James.

5. A brief acknowledgement here of how underused a pre-moustache Coleman is. It may have been overkill to have both Hackman and Coleman in coaching roles, but as regular readers will note, I have a bit of a soft spot for ol’ Dabs.

6. And let us not forget the spectator who guzzles his Glühwein with all the lust and rolling eyes of a professional sot. Honestly, he’s like something out of Hard to be a God.

7. A brief word on Sparv, accurately described by ex-husband Robert Evans as a “tall, leggy blonde, she had the natural patrician quality money can’t buy.” She’s given very little to do beyond engage in the kind of 1960s beautiful people courtship dance of fast cars, great scenery, and aggressive kissing, but there’s something fun in the way she cheerfully refuses to be Chappellet’s property. And fair play to her for mucking in with the rest of the cast, doing her own hair and wearing off-the-rack clothes.