Like So Many Great Directors of the Seventies, Michael Ritchie’s Career Got Off to a Great Start With a Classic Debut (1969’s Downhill Racer) and Ended With a Muddled Dud (The Fantastiks)
Michael Ritchie had such an extraordinary 1970s that it was seemingly inevitable that the subsequent decades would suffer by comparison. Ritchie had his share of successes after the zeitgeist-shifting failure of Heaven’s Gate heralded the end of the New Hollywood era that proved his, and many other filmmakers’ heyday.
The roguish 1992 boxing comedy Diggstown has attracted a loyal cult and his hit 1985 adaptation of Fletch famously gave a certain subset of tedious men a series of quotes to endlessly recycle in lieu of actual personalities. The 1993 television movie The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom meanwhile, generated ecstatic reviews heralding it as a return to form for the floundering filmmaker.
But nothing in Ritchie’s checkered later career could match the extraordinary eight year stretch that gave the world 1969’s Downhill Racer, 1972’s The Candidate and Prime Cut, 1975’s Smile, 1976’s The Bad News Bears and 1977’s Semi Tough.
Ritchie was a very 1970s filmmaker who brought a sociological understanding to the fascinating cultural milieus he explored in his films, whether that meant the dangerous, glamorous world of championship skiing (Downhill Racer), organized crime at its most brutish and hyper-violent (Prime Cut), electoral politics (The Candidate), the occasionally overlapping worlds of professional football and EST-style personal improvement fads (Semi Pro) and children’s baseball as seen through the bleary, bloodshot eyes of the most lovable screen drunk/misanthrope this side of W.C. Fields (The Bad News Bears).
Like many of his peers, Ritchie’s extraordinary 1970s began a little early, with 1969’s Downhill Racer, a New Hollywood classic that indelibly established Ritchie as an audacious and accomplished young auteur with a unique grasp on the wild, complicated world of sports.
Where lesser filmmakers gravitate towards sports due to its abundance of crowd-pleasing cliches and well-worn, time-tested formula, Ritchie was instead interested in using sports as a means of exploring the complexities of the human condition and how they’re reflected in the societies they build.
That’s because Ritchie’s best sports films aren’t really about sports so much as they are about people who happen to be athletes. Roger Ebert summed it up eloquently when he called Downhill Racer, Ritchie’s rightfully revered debut, ”the best movie ever made about sports—without really being about sports at all.”
At the height of his otherworldly beauty and charisma, Robert Redford is absolutely mesmerizing as cocky championship skier David Chappellet. The brash athlete embodies an archetype Redford and later Tom Cruise excelled at playing: an impossibly gorgeous, brash young man who is one of the best in the world at what he does, if not the best but must learn to overcome his adolescent recklessness and penchant for self-destruction with the help of a gruff but fair mentor and a beautiful woman.
In Downhill Racer, the tough but fair mentor is coach Eugene Claire (Gene Hackman, an authoritative middle aged man even at the very beginning of his extraordinary film career), who is impressed by the hotshot’s performances on the slopes but put off by his arrogance and selfishness and the woman is Carole (Camilla Sparv), the gorgeous assistant of a big timer who wants David to use and endorse his skis.
David begins the film an underdog whose arrogance is not supported by his modest achievements but as he exceeds his coach’s expectations and becomes a contender and then a star his ego grows accordingly. David is a dashing young man in a terrible hurry to get to where he wants to go and isn’t about to let anything or anyone get in his way.
That’s the crazy thing about Downhill Racer: it’s full of shopworn, cliched elements, including a final race with impossibly high stakes that pits the hero against the best in the world with the entire universe watching but somehow never feels cliched or particularly conventional. That’s because Ritchie finds exhilaratingly new ways to dramatize familiar themes.
Downhill Racer would be essential viewing for its skiing sequences alone. In Ritchie and cinematographer Brian Probyn’s assured hands, skiing is a breathlessly cinematic spectacle, a kinetic combination of power and grace, elegance and brute strength, where even the most accomplished skier is seemingly never more than a few seconds away from losing control and tumbling artlessly all over the ice.
No matter how many times the world-class skiers in Downhill Racer lose their balance on an unforgiving slope and crash it never loses its devastating visceral power. A breathtaking set-piece where we see one of the protagonist’s races from his viewpoint as he rockets down the slope at unnerving speeds is disorienting in its intensity and hypnotic in its fury. Downhill Racer is an adrenaline rush of a movie that never loses sight that it is fundamentally about flawed, fascinating people, not just some of the flashiest skiing ever committee to film.
But Ritchie’s masterful character study of a callow young man on the rise doesn’t prize impact over coherence or storytelling. It’s the perfect fusion of style and substance, nuanced storytelling and roller coaster thrills. Ritchie would emerge as the preeminent jock of New Hollywood almost by default. Even in the lean years he gravitated towards sports movies like 1986’s Wildcats and 1993’s The Scout.
After all, it’s not like there were a lot of other iconoclastic filmmakers turning their attention to the ostensibly commercial, mainstream world of sports filmmaking in the 1970s but from the very beginning Ritchie had a singular genius for capturing the excitement and comedy and drama of sports in every form but also the humanity.
The Fantasticks, which was completed in 1995 but not released until a seeming eternity afterwards, was not the final film Ritchie made. That distinction belongs to the fantasy 1997 comedy A Simple Wish. But it is the final film of Ritchie’s to be released theatrically in the United States when five years after it was completed as a 109 minute film Francis Ford Coppola, of all people, edited it down to an 86 minute version that screened on four theaters in 2000.
The Fantasticks was a product of 1995 left moldering on a shelf for five long years but it’s so old-fashioned and retro in its aesthetic and its sensibility that it could easily be confused for the product of 1965 or 1955. That’s partially because the theatrical warhorse Ritchie was adapting debuted on Off Broadway some three and a half decades earlier, and was still running when The Fantasticks was made and when it was actually released, or rather “released.”
The Fantasticks ran for forty-two years and 17,162 performances Off Broadway from 1960 to 2002, shattering all records for longevity in the process. Yet whatever strange hold The Fantasticks held over audiences as a minimalist stage musical did not extend to its modest, muddled screen adaptation, a longtime labor of love for its director that must have been a terrible disappointment on multiple levels.
Joe McEntire, the youngest member of 1980s boy band New Kids on the Block, is hopelessly callow and unforgivably bland as Matt Hucklebee, the film’s white-bread protagonist, an earnest young man who has fallen hopelessly in love with Luisa Bellamy (Jean Louisa Kelly) the female ingenue next door, out of youthful passion but also to stick it to their single fathers Amos Babcock Bellamy (Joel Grey) and Ben Hucklebee (Brad Sullivan), who they think despise each other with a white-hot passion.
The corny twist is that the fathers are merely pretending to hate each other to trick their progeny into thinking they’re driving their dear old dads insane when in fact they’re fulfilling their fondest wish, for their two families to be brought together in holy matrimony.
But the fathers aren’t taking any chances. They see their children’s lives as elaborate theatrical productions that must engineer and then execute behind their children’s backs to ensure that domestic bliss can be the only outcome. All the world’s a stage in The Fantasticks. It’s hard to know where reality ends and the performance begins or if the distinction even matters.
To that end the scheming dads join forces with El Gaillo (Jonathon Morris), the ringmaster and proprietor of a mysterious carnival that has swept into town and bewitched the townspeople and Shakespearean performer Henry Albertson (Barnard Hughes) to stage a scenario where Luisa becomes a damsel in distress when El Gallo’s colorful forces abduct her and her passionate young suitor must prove his valor and heroism by rescuing her.
The ruse works spectacularly due to the kids not being the brightest tools in the shed but when the fathers’ duplicity is exposed the corny good times and high spirits come to an abrupt end when the young lovers drift apart without the unlikely glue of mutual familial hatred to keep them together.
The sappy young man leaves his hometown to seek his fortune and learn about the world and its wicked ways while the young woman falls under the spell of the seductive circus-master, who has Satan’s own charm and powers of illusion. It’s easy to see why she would be attracted to the carnival barker’s shadowy appeal, if only because McEntire comes off as such a stiff.
The Fantasticks’ appeal in its early going lies in its cornball Americana, its old fashioned, Norman Rockwellian charm. So it’s jarring and a little disorienting when the movie shifts tones dramatically about halfway through and a goofy celebration of young love, American-style, becomes a downbeat drama about a 1920s Adam and Eve who taste from the fruit of forbidden knowledge and must atone for their transgressions.
The Fantasticks concludes with El Gallo’s singing “Try to Remember”, the musical’s most famous number. It’s the one that fueled its ascent to record-shattering success, a mournful, melancholy and deeply nostalgic look at aging and mortality and our soul-deep yearning to return to the innocence of the past, even if we know that that innocence is just another illusion, another sick trick of memory.
In “Try to Remember”, El Gallo sings, “without a hurt the heart is hollow.” It’s a sentiment that unfortunately speaks directly and powerfully to the problems at its core.
There just is not enough authentic hurt in The Fantasticks for it to not feel hollow where its heart should be. It’s not an encouraging sign when a musical does not earn its most legendary number, the one so popular and so unforgettable that it transcends the musical that birthed it.
Though The Fantasticks is a much better film, if one might set the bar impossibly low, The Fantasticks doesn’t deserve the wallop of “Try To Remember” any more than Cats deserves Jennifer Hudson belting out “Memories.”
Ritchie began his career with a masterpiece that felt newer than tomorrow and ended it with a corny throwback that feels older than all the yesterdays in the world. The Fantasticks’ sappiness does not suit a filmmaker who purposefully eschewed sentimentality in his signature work but its incongruous darkness doesn’t either.
Like many filmmakers who peaked in the 1970s, Ritchie roared out the gate with a movie where he had complete control over his vision and how to achieve it, only to close out with a confused, troubled flop that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to do or how to do it.
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