As it is, Downhill Racer stands out as one of the sharpest little films of its era, capturing something you seldom see-the sharklike focus of great athletes-and offering a prescient look at everything from the increasing marriage of business and sports to the rise of celebrity culture. Certainly the sex scenes would’ve been hotter. Redford originally wanted Roman Polanski to direct the movie, and one imagines that this “evil, profligate dwarf” (as he once described himself) might well have made an edgier, richer film. Still, what struck me when I watched the DVD the other day is the film’s brisk tautness (Salter was clearly channeling Hemingway) and its documentary feel director Michael Ritchie does a nifty job of catching life on the wing. The footage is still exciting, not least because you can tell it wasn’t manufactured by some schlub sitting at a computer. When I first saw Downhill Racer, I was wowed by the handheld-camera work that gives you a skier’s-eye view of whooshing down a mountainside. David may be a creep, but he’s a fast one. Naturally, his attitude drives everyone on his team nuts, especially the coach, Eugene Claire ( Gene Hackman), a man of the old school who must learn to accept David’s ungentlemanly ways because this upstart offers him the best chance of fulfilling his dream of having an American skier win Olympic gold. Bristling with impatience, he has a classic antihero’s dislike of authority, although he seems closer to a hard-edged fifties rebel than a dithering sixties counterculture type. David basically likes doing whatever the hell he wants to, be it flouting the politesse of international athletics (Federer he ain’t) or using his girlfriend back home as a sex toy. Yet while he’s unworldly enough to get schooled by a sophisticated European woman, played with impeccable cool by Swedish actress Camilla Sparv, he has something his social betters do not: the focused ruthlessness of a winner. Unlike his teammates who come from Ivy League backgrounds, David’s from the sticks he doesn’t know what a bidet is but pretends that he does. Redford plays David Chappellet, a selfish hotshot invited to join the U.S. Four decades later, Downhill Racer seems better than ever, not merely the best film ever made about skiing (an encomium that’s almost an insult) but that rarest of triumphs-a pointedly unsentimental sports movie. How badly did he want to make the movie? Well, to do it, he turned down the role of **Mia Farrow’**s husband in Rosemary’s Baby (although, as it turned out, he could hardly have been better than John Cassavetes). For the first leg of a projected trilogy about winning, Redford dreamed up the idea of a movie about alpine skiing, brought on writer James Salter, followed the ski tour in Europe for research, talked Paramount into backing the film, then wound up producing and starring in the picture. I’m not sure he ever believed in a project more than the 1969 movie Downhill Racer, now out on a gorgeous new DVD from the Criterion Collection. (What is this year’s festival winner, Precious, if not a bleaker, Harlem-based Ordinary People?) Redford has become such an institution that it’s easy to forget that he was once an exciting, even daring figure who gave fresh performances and, back when he didn’t have much money, once turned down $10,000 a week to do a TV series because he didn’t want to get sucked into what he called “the honey trap.” He wanted to do something he believed in. The young actor really did have the secret, and over the next years, he used it to invent the iconic figure we now think of as Robert Redford, the blond superstar of the seventies and eighties, the respected (if unadulated) film director, and the Godfather of Sundance, where his own sensibility, forged by fifties TV problem dramas, has shaped indie filmmaking for the last quarter century. Stirred by the idea of inventing his character, Redford plunged back into the role, and the play became a smash. Nichols explained that it was up to Redford himself to decide who Bratter was. It seems that Redford was having a miserable time-behaving badly, giving a lazy performance as his character, Paul Bratter-when director Mike Nichols took him to dinner to see if he could reenergize his star. About a quarter of the way into Robert Redford: The Biography, a decidedly un-juicy (read: authorized) portrait just out from Knopf, Michael Feeney Callan tells a story about the 1963 Broadway production of Barefoot in the Park.
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