Killy made Olympic history in 1968 by becoming only the second male skier to win gold medals in three alpine events. He grew up in the French ski resort village of Val d'Isere, in the French Alps, and dropped out of school at age fifteen to focus on skiing. Killy won his first race at eighteen and competed in the 1964 Olympics, but did poorly because of illness. By 1968, he had won several prestigious races, including the World Cup, and his performance at the Olympics was the pinnacle of his ski career. Shortly thereafter, he retired from competition. Brash, ambitious and movie-star handsome, Killy concentrated on his business interests, had a brief career as a race car driver, and appeared in television commercials. Inevitably, he was courted by movie producers, and in 1972, he made his film debut in Snow Job, which was filmed on location Cervinia, Italy and Zermatt, Switzerland in the spring of 1971. The spectacularly-photographed skiing sequences were shot by former German skier turned cinematographer Willy Bogner. A Variety article described how Bogner filmed some of glacier sequences by skiing backwards with a handheld camera, and other panoramic scenes were shot from a helicopter.
Those sequences are the best in the film, and Killy is superb in them. But when he takes off the skis, his limitations as an actor are painfully evident. As a reviewer in Time magazine wrote, "Waxing romantic or working out plans for an elaborate robbery, Jean-Claude always manages to sound as if he were making a half-hearted pitch for Chap Stick." According to an article in the Hollywood Reporter, actress Cloris Leachman, wife of the film's director George Englund, dubbed co-star Daniele Gaubert's voice in the English-language version of Snow Job. Gaubert, an established French star, met Killy in late 1968 and they had been a couple ever since. They married in 1973, and after making Snow Job she retired from the screen to raise their family. The marriage lasted until Gaubert's death from cancer in 1987.
Reviews for Snow Job praised the skiing sequences, but not much else. New York Times critic Roger Greenspun wrote, "Asking this cast to do drama, even melodrama, is a little like having, say, the cast of Endless Summer play King Lear." The one exception, according to Greenspun, is the great Vittorio de Sica. "De Sica's part is pure hogwash, and he himself brings much of the ham to it. But he is so beautiful, and so marvelously, joyously phony, and he has such a trick of turning everyone else's fixed grin into a kind of maniacal laughter--that despite the sun and the snow and the skies, he almost persuades us we are at the movies."
Snow Job was not a box office success, and Killy, who always wanted to be the best at whatever he attempted, never made another feature film. That drive for perfection also led him to give up skiing soon after. He later took up snowboarding, and remained involved with the Olympics, most recently as the chief supervisor the Sochi games in 2014.
Director: George Englund
Producer: Edward L. Rissien
Screenplay: Ken Kolb, Jeffrey Bloom
Cinematography: Gabor Pogany, Willy Bogner
Editor: Gary Griffen
Costume Design: Bona Nasalli-Rocca
Art Direction: Aurelio Crugnolla
Music: Jacques Lussier
Principal Cast: Jean-Claude Killy (Christian Biton), Daniele Gaubert (Monica Scotti), Cliff Potts (Bob Skinner), Vittorio de Sica (Enrico Dolphi), Lelio Luttazzi (Simonelli), Delia Boccardo (Lorraine Borman), Umberto D'Orsi (Vito)
90 minutes
by Margarita Landazuri
