Roman Polanski was meant to direct Downhill Racer but producer Robert Evans diverted him on to Rosemary’s Baby instead. So here’s Michael Ritchie’s pass at the same material. The former TV director does a good job, and let’s face it Rosemary’s Baby needed Polanski.
Good jobs are done all round in fact. Mostly by Robert Redford, actually acting against type for once rather than just smiling and looking handsome, playing a skier who is part of the US effort to bust apart European dominance of winter sports.
The thing about Redford’s Dave Chappellet, though, is that he’s not a team player. Nor, depending on how you look at it, is downhill skiing really a team sport. Sure national teams are entered to compete, but each man skis on his own, a fact Chappellet never tires of making to team mates bemused by his endless self-regard.
So this is a movie about a self-centred, got-it-all individualist learning to embrace his fellow man? It looks like it is heading in that direction and I won’t ruin the plot but I will just say that the movie would probably be better remembered if a Damascene conversion were really what it was all about.
It works best as a precise portrait of an asshole – Chappellet in Europe for the first time and pretending he’s seen a bidet before; Chappellet examining himself in the bathroom mirror and liking what he sees; Chappellet back home where he screws an old girlfriend who wants him a lot more than he wants her; Chappellet with his hard-working old dad, who clearly thinks he’s accidentally raised a monster.
In between the bulletins from the capital of Assholia, scenes set out in the pristine white of Austria, where Ritchie makes much use of zoom lenses (and occasionally speeds up the film), as Chappellet moves up the ranking, taking his team towards the goal of beating Europe at their own game – winter sports.
Some of this stuff is rote and some of it is breathtaking. Particularly good is the sequence done at full hurtle down a long and perilous slope, captured probably by someone on skis with a camera strapped on at knee height. There is a real sense of being there.
Redford, the college athlete, is suited to the role, looks good in the gear and may even be doing some of the skiing. Also filling in supporting roles are Gene Hackman, two years before his breakthrough in The French Connection, as the team coach trying to control Chappellet’s behaviour, deal with the media and raise enough money to keep the show on the road. And Camilla Sparv, a Swedish model who ended her short run in movies around this point before switching into TV. She plays the high-class looker who likes what she sees in Chappellet and who gives him a taste of his own medicine – he does not like it. She’s one of the vultures who start to buzz around, the people who are attracted to success and want either to sleep with it or make money out of it.
Also hanging around at the edges are the media – the TV guys who don’t quite know as much as they’re pretending, the newspaper reporters who need spoonfeeding answers, the magazine interviewer who simply hasn’t a clue and is mocked by the American team for her stupid questions.
It is a good portrait of a jock out of control and of the world he inhabits. In sports movies good guys tend to finish first. But Chappellet is not that kind of guy and the deeply unsentimental Downhill Racer is not that kind of film.
Downhill Racer – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
