Michael Ritchie
(for example, those played by Robert Redford in Downhill Racer and The Candidate). They too are men who either fail or refuse to be integrated into the system, who are torn between reconciling what is expected of them with their own sense of individuality and personal integrity. In other words, the particular nature of Ritchie’s filmmaking (individualist, independent) is precisely reflected in the kind of heroes who interest him. itchie’s first film, Downhill Racer (1969), sets out themes which he is to pursue in his subsequent work. It tells the story of an ambitious c h a m p io n sh ip sk ie r, D avid Chappellet (Robert Redford), and, Robert Rossen’s The Hustler, the film relates the hero’s successes and failures to his person ality. Unlike The Hustler, however, the hero’s success is directly attributable to his character defects: namely, egocentricity and ruthlessness. For all the moral homilies of the coach, Eugene Claire (Gene Hackman), about education and about the “ justice of sport” being “ sacrifice without end” , Redford’s hero remains selfish, voluntarily choosing isolation as a necessary corollary to becoming champion. Ritchie has said that practically all the discussion he had with Redford during the shooting was concerned not with whether Chappellet was a heel or not, but how much of a heel they should make him. The skiing there fore becomes an ingenious dramatic correlative to the character: he remains as icy as the surface over which he has such mastery; his sin is pride and skiing is the one sport where to fall is tragic. There are two essential strategies in this for Ritchie, which he is to pursue in later films. The first is to offer an ironic inflection of genre. In Downhill Racer, this takes the form of an interrogation of the sentimental equation usually proposed by sports films (even sophisti cated ones, like Body and Soul, The Hustler and Chariots of Fire) between winning and morality. The hero of Downhill Racer does not become a winner because he is humanized: it is simply that he puts winning above everything else. At the same time, the cost of winning is alienation, and this is the second part of Ritchie’s strategy: to propose the film as a critique of the American ideology of success. Ritchie’s sports films — Downhill Racer, The Bad News Bears, Semi-Tough (1977) — are witty and satirical studies of sport as an exten sion of American aggression. More especially, they are studies of sport as an extension of American commercialism. Ritchie’s sports films are unusual in the emphasis they place not on the individual but on the commercial importance of sponsorship and on the capitalist dimension of sport (George Roy Hill’s Slap Shot owes a great deal to Ritchie in this regard). If The Godfather posited an equation between crime and capitalism (“ It’s strictly business, Sonny” , says Michael on his road to becoming an assassin), Ritchie’s analogy with the com mercial world is sport: business as play, sport as big business. It is a truism to say that all of Ritchie’s films are structured around competi tions of one sort or another. It might be more true to say that Ritchie’s films are about the ideology of competitiveness, in the fullest sense of the word — “ competitiveness” being the magic word of modern industrial society. All of Ritchie’s films, then, either implicitly or explicitly, are not only products of a capitalist society, they are about capitalism. Smile is about selling yourself, just as The Candidate is about the process whereby political people are manufactured into political
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products. (The self-conscious documentary devices in Downhill Racer, The Candidate and Smile are not simply there to intensify immediacy but to draw attention to the opera tions of the media and the way it presents a highly subjective and saleable view of the world.) The boldness of Ritchie’s films lies in their questioning of commercial values within this capitalist structure. The central achieve ment of The Bad News Bears is the manoeuvring by which Ritchie convinces us that it is essential for the Bad News Bears to lose rather than win their final game. (The final shot of the U.S. flag over the stadium makes explicit the relevance of the film’s theme to the American obsession with competitiveness and winners.) Given this interest, the central problem for Ritchie is the one that caught up quite quickly with Preston Sturges and has overtaken Billy Wilder in the latter stages of his career. How long can one satirize the American Dream, expose the ironies of so-called success and the hollowness of materialist endeavour, and still function in an industry so deeply wedded to those notions of competition, salesmanship and commercialism? If Ritchie is obsessed with competitiveness, the reason is that he is intensely aware of what such an obsession might cost in human terms. His affectionate and pervasive use of children suggests the alternative dimension to the theme of competitiveness and ambition, which is a regret for lost innocence, a yearning for secure and enduring human values which, in his films, often takes the form of a search for a father figure. The relationship between hero and father has great significance in Downhill Racer and The Candidate, implying that the heroes’ worldly ambition is in some ways a compensa tion for the failure of human contact at home. The antagonistic relationship between father and son is a sub-text of Smile and the central theme of The Island. Both Poppy (Sissy Spacek) in Prime Cut and Amanda Whurlizer (Tatum O’Neal) in The Bad News Bears are searching for surrogate father figures. Indeed, The Bad News Bears is perhaps ulti mately more about fathers and families than it is about sport. It is apprehensive about the callous way adults use children as a projection
Above: championship skier David Chappellet (Robert Redford) and coach Eugene Claire (Gene Hackman). Downhill Racer. Below: coach Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau) and junior baseball team in The Bad News Bears. Bottom: football star Bill Puckett (Burt Reynolds) and fans in Semi-Tough.
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CINEMA PAPERS October — 417