DOWNHILL RACER (1969: Dir. Michael Ritchie)
Having recently announced his retirement from acting, Robert Redford can look back with pride on a cinematic legacy that combined substantive artistic endeavour with quality entertainment. It was a long road to get there and it began in the late 1960s when the film Barefoot in the Park (1967) had finally secured his popular stardom after a string of noble failures including: Inside Daisy Clover (1965), The Chase (1966), and This Property is Condemned (1966). Capitalizing on this box office success, Redford began to develop his own ideas for film roles that would challenge the public's perception of him as a slice of blonde Californian beefcake. The first project that captured his imagination was a film to be directed by Roman Polanski based on Oakley Hall's novel The Downhill Racers. Despite his fanatical interest in the sport of skiing, Polanski left to direct Rosemary's Baby (1968) after he clashed creatively with Redford over the script. Undaunted, Redford personally took over the project as an unofficial producer, approaching numerous prominent film directors to no avail, until he offered the job to television director Michael Ritchie. A 6 foot 7 inch tall intellectual, Ritchie cut an imposing figure whose visual ideas for scenes were hard fought, even when in conflict with Redford, his sponsor and star. Both men envisioned the film to be made in an almost documentary style, a low budget approach that was required by Redford's parsimonious production partnership with Paramount Pictures chairman Charles Bludhorn. It was a daring stylistic experiment. Few Hollywood films at the time had taken a leap into Cinéma vérité but both Ritchie and Redford knew that a story critical of American exceptionalism needed to abandon all pretense of artifice. Reflecting the 1965 formation of a full-time United States ski team, Downhill Racer is a hard-hitting examination of an athlete who sees winning as the only option. In the title role of Dave Chappellet, Redford is a revelation playing an amateur athlete struggling to be noticed by his cold displeasing farmer father. Willfully shunning audience sympathy, Redford carefully reveals him to be both ruthless competitor and vainglorious pretty boy. Ever the canny businessman, Redford hedged his bets with a previous film project Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a huge box office hit which opened only a week before Downhill Racer. As written in William Goldman's sparkling script, Redford's Sundance Kid is a young hot shot starting to believe in his own legend, but unlike the serious and self-absorbed Chappellet, Sundance's breezy sardonic humour helps to undercut any arrogant macho posturing, resulting in a much more sympathetic anti-hero. Shortly after Downhill Racer, Redford would re-visit the world of competitive sport, this time as a womanizing motorcycle racer in Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), one of his few subsequent critical and commercial failures. Redford also successfully re-united with director Ritchie for The Candidate (1974), a trenchant satire of ideological politics in the post Nixon era. As he approached middle age Redford would make his other statement about sport and fame in America, The Natural (1984) directed by Barry Levinson. By this time the Reagan era had largely washed away the cynicism of the Seventies and Redford wholly embraced this new optimism with a mythologizing story about a near superhuman baseball hero. The Natural represented Redford as pure entertainer, a somewhat surprising contrast to Downhill Racer which had been Redford as social gadfly. In his most recent years in front of and behind the camera, he has continued to challenge notions of American political and moral authority with a series of films including: Lions for Lambs (2007), The Conspirator (2010), The Company You Keep (2012), and Truth (2015). If his promise to retire is fulfilled then he has left us a significant body of work. Films that make us ask questions to ourselves and others while at the same time conveying Robert Redford's belief in the power of humanity to learn from its mistakes, slowly making its way toward self-awareness. Blu-ray
