Going Nowhere

The jungle is the prison in Buñuel's diamond mine drama "Death in the Garden," finally out on DVD.

A leaner exercise in going nowhere, Michael Ritchie’s “Downhill Racer” (1969) continues Criterion’s efforts to re-inject certain neglected fixtures of the American New Wave (like “Two-Lane Blacktop” and “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”) back into the bloodstream of film culture.

One of the most bitter sports movies ever made, Ritchie’s film loiters around in yet another great overlooked subculture — competitive downhill skiing, following blond sunshine kid Robert Redford, a narcissistic and socially repressed hot shot silently dedicated to winning at nearly any cost, as he negotiates the European trials on the U.S. team leading up to the Olympics.

Variety critic Todd McCarthy uses the word “flinty” in the DVD’s liner notes, and that’s it — every race is as real as news footage (most of them are real), every off-hill scene is an exercise in anti-showbiz restraint — so what we get is almost a documentary, warily observing the clueless, bullheaded Yank maneuver through the chalets of the Swiss Alps and wait for his chance to push the envelope on the slopes.

When James Monaco wrote a summary statement of the era in 1979′s “American Film Now,” Ritchie was one of his industry messiahs, having demonstrated with “Downhill Racer,” “Smile” (1975), “The Bad News Bears” (1976) and “Semi-Tough” (1977) a distinctly acidic perspective that exemplified the era’s glorious, movies-for-grown-ups maturity. But as Monaco didn’t quite see the threat of the Spielberg-Lucas brainwashing that followed, where Ritchie found himself outmoded, and the de rigueur days when American films were interested in textural truth, and stars like Redford could play mundane pricks with complete conviction, were through.

A box office non-starter, “Downhill Racer” may’ve been too withholding and bleak even for 1969, but today, it’s a flashback to a bygone day when movies about giant robots and blue-skinned aliens would’ve played only in matinees, so the adults would have the theaters to themselves come evening.

“Death in the Garden” (Microcinema DVD) and “Downhill Racer” (Criterion Collection) are now available on DVD.

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