Rollerball (15.)
Directed by Norman Jewison. 1975
Starring James Caan, John Houseman, Jon Beck, Moses Gunn, Shane Rimmer, Maud Adams and Ralph Richardson. 125 mins.
The poster for Rollerball was, along with posters for films like Tommy and, er, Young Frankenstein, one that haunted my childhood. During occasional family car trips up to London I would be both disturbed and intrigued by them and their appearance on the top corners of double deckers. Rollerball's featured an image of a man in a spiked helmet and a raised spiked fist with ladies in party dresses fleeing in the bottom corner, and it seemed to suggest unimaginable depravities and horrors.
Of course, Rollerball is actually a very nice film, a very proper liberal allegory about totalitarian society, corporate greed and the use of gladiatorial sports to quell dissent and sate the masses made by the utterly respectable and utterly Canadian, Norman Jewison. But there is also something dark and nasty in there.
Rollerball is a typically 70s piece of sci-fi. The 50s optimism is long gone but the dystopian age heralded by Blade Runner (or perhaps Alien) is still a few years away and in the 70s they seemed to specialize in future societies that were bleak but beautifully clean and efficiently well run.
As a vision of the future Rollerball is like an episode of the TV series of Logan's Run directed by someone who is obsessed with the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. The interiors are all wind chimes and shag pile carpets while the exteriors are the space age as envisaged by the architects of the Munich Olympic village (where the film was largely shot.) But there are also lots of shots of fecund woodland or forest fresh from rain that might have graced the prologue of Solaris. The party scene halfway through the picture is perhaps the most thoroughly “European” sequences ever inserted into a mainstream Hollywood movie, especially one as violent as this – it certainly far more effective than Woody Allen's various efforts at being Bergman and Fellini, if only because of its incongruity. The film's classical music score (most strikingly Bach's Toccata and Fugue) seem to be there to put some distance between filmmaker and their subject.
The game of Rollerball is a neat amalgam of American sporting excesses, mixing up elements of gridiron, ice hockey, basketball and roller derbies taken to gladiatorial excess. It has been designed as a way to pacify the masses, to sublimate their rebellious and violent urges. It's bread and circuses, hand delivered on skates. The star of this world is Jonathan E (Caan) who has survived in the game for ten years, holds most of its records and is about to make his Houston team world champions again. Except the corporate bosses (represented by Houseman) want to force him to retire and enjoy his riches, fearing that he has become bigger than the game. When Johnathan refuses the rules are changed to make the game even more barbaric and deadly.
There are various improbably aspects to Rollerball and chief among them would be how someone like Caan could survive and prosper in this sport for ten years. Such a sport would need incredible reflexes and agility, but also great strength and Caan, who was rodeo rider at the time, is certainly athletic but slender, almost whippet thin.
Caan is very strange in this film. To play a sportsman who is maybe not the brightest he's closed off a lot of his facial expressions. The forehead dominates his face, like it's a great weight pushing down on his eyes. They squint out like they are peering from beneath the brim of a low slung hat. His mouth is a narrow slit and he seems intent on moving his jaw as little as possible, like a taciturn ventriloquist doll. He almost anti charismatic.
He is an improbable hero in a film whose message is confused. It makes a big deal about this being a future without countries and war, where the planet has been divided up by the corporations after the Corporate Wars. Yet the world we are offered doesn't seem like the result of rampant free market; it looks very much like a Cold War vision of a communist future, a world where everything is state controlled. More crucially, it really doesn't seem to be that bad a world. The film only shows us life among the pampered elite, we have no idea what conditions are like for the workers, the poor saps that follow Rollerball.
Monster Plot Spoilers From Now On.
When Jonathan rebels against state control we don't know what motivates him, because he doesn't know himself. Everybody tells him to get out of this grisly spectacle but he can't quit it, the adulation or the power. “I love this game” he says to best friend and team mate Moonpie (Beck) during the second game in Tokyo, minutes before Moonpie is killed.
American movies, hell American culture, always teaches us to value freedom and individualism above all else. In Rollerball we see a totalitarian society that is rigid but functional and comfortable. Granted it's an incomplete picture but as future totalitarian society go, it's not a bad one to live in. It may be only bread and circuses, but bread and circuses ain’t bad. The film ends with Johnathan triumphing in the Rollerball world final. The last man standing, he begins to circle the ring and the audience start to chant his name. Rebellion, it is suggested, is imminent. The final shots are a close ups of his face. Look at the face: does that face suggest the emergence of a kind and benevolent leader, one who will create a fairer society. He looks to me more like Caligula on roller skates. The message seems to me that however we strive to reorder and run society, it will always be undone by selfish individualism. Mr E just doesn't want to be told what to do.
Extras.
As ever with Arrow Films they really load you up with extras and there's quality as well as quantity. The snippets of Jewison's commentary I heard were, to be honest, a bit dull (there's also one with writer William Harrison that I haven't tried) but the five featurettes are all good value. There's a 25 minute Making Of documentary from 2001; a 7 minute short feature tracing the links between Rollerball and Roman gladiator ring that was made to accompany its release; an interview with James Caan; and two brand new features one revisiting the Munich locations used in the film and an interview with stuntman Craig R. Baxley. Not always that keen on behind the scenes films but these were all really engaging and if you want to know, during the Baxley feature there is opportunity to freeze frame and read the complete Rollerball rule book. There's also an accompanying booklet with pictures and essays on the film.
Directed by Norman Jewison. 1975
Starring James Caan, John Houseman, Jon Beck, Moses Gunn, Shane Rimmer, Maud Adams and Ralph Richardson. 125 mins.
The poster for Rollerball was, along with posters for films like Tommy and, er, Young Frankenstein, one that haunted my childhood. During occasional family car trips up to London I would be both disturbed and intrigued by them and their appearance on the top corners of double deckers. Rollerball's featured an image of a man in a spiked helmet and a raised spiked fist with ladies in party dresses fleeing in the bottom corner, and it seemed to suggest unimaginable depravities and horrors.
Of course, Rollerball is actually a very nice film, a very proper liberal allegory about totalitarian society, corporate greed and the use of gladiatorial sports to quell dissent and sate the masses made by the utterly respectable and utterly Canadian, Norman Jewison. But there is also something dark and nasty in there.
Rollerball is a typically 70s piece of sci-fi. The 50s optimism is long gone but the dystopian age heralded by Blade Runner (or perhaps Alien) is still a few years away and in the 70s they seemed to specialize in future societies that were bleak but beautifully clean and efficiently well run.
As a vision of the future Rollerball is like an episode of the TV series of Logan's Run directed by someone who is obsessed with the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. The interiors are all wind chimes and shag pile carpets while the exteriors are the space age as envisaged by the architects of the Munich Olympic village (where the film was largely shot.) But there are also lots of shots of fecund woodland or forest fresh from rain that might have graced the prologue of Solaris. The party scene halfway through the picture is perhaps the most thoroughly “European” sequences ever inserted into a mainstream Hollywood movie, especially one as violent as this – it certainly far more effective than Woody Allen's various efforts at being Bergman and Fellini, if only because of its incongruity. The film's classical music score (most strikingly Bach's Toccata and Fugue) seem to be there to put some distance between filmmaker and their subject.
The game of Rollerball is a neat amalgam of American sporting excesses, mixing up elements of gridiron, ice hockey, basketball and roller derbies taken to gladiatorial excess. It has been designed as a way to pacify the masses, to sublimate their rebellious and violent urges. It's bread and circuses, hand delivered on skates. The star of this world is Jonathan E (Caan) who has survived in the game for ten years, holds most of its records and is about to make his Houston team world champions again. Except the corporate bosses (represented by Houseman) want to force him to retire and enjoy his riches, fearing that he has become bigger than the game. When Johnathan refuses the rules are changed to make the game even more barbaric and deadly.
There are various improbably aspects to Rollerball and chief among them would be how someone like Caan could survive and prosper in this sport for ten years. Such a sport would need incredible reflexes and agility, but also great strength and Caan, who was rodeo rider at the time, is certainly athletic but slender, almost whippet thin.
Caan is very strange in this film. To play a sportsman who is maybe not the brightest he's closed off a lot of his facial expressions. The forehead dominates his face, like it's a great weight pushing down on his eyes. They squint out like they are peering from beneath the brim of a low slung hat. His mouth is a narrow slit and he seems intent on moving his jaw as little as possible, like a taciturn ventriloquist doll. He almost anti charismatic.
He is an improbable hero in a film whose message is confused. It makes a big deal about this being a future without countries and war, where the planet has been divided up by the corporations after the Corporate Wars. Yet the world we are offered doesn't seem like the result of rampant free market; it looks very much like a Cold War vision of a communist future, a world where everything is state controlled. More crucially, it really doesn't seem to be that bad a world. The film only shows us life among the pampered elite, we have no idea what conditions are like for the workers, the poor saps that follow Rollerball.
Monster Plot Spoilers From Now On.
When Jonathan rebels against state control we don't know what motivates him, because he doesn't know himself. Everybody tells him to get out of this grisly spectacle but he can't quit it, the adulation or the power. “I love this game” he says to best friend and team mate Moonpie (Beck) during the second game in Tokyo, minutes before Moonpie is killed.
American movies, hell American culture, always teaches us to value freedom and individualism above all else. In Rollerball we see a totalitarian society that is rigid but functional and comfortable. Granted it's an incomplete picture but as future totalitarian society go, it's not a bad one to live in. It may be only bread and circuses, but bread and circuses ain’t bad. The film ends with Johnathan triumphing in the Rollerball world final. The last man standing, he begins to circle the ring and the audience start to chant his name. Rebellion, it is suggested, is imminent. The final shots are a close ups of his face. Look at the face: does that face suggest the emergence of a kind and benevolent leader, one who will create a fairer society. He looks to me more like Caligula on roller skates. The message seems to me that however we strive to reorder and run society, it will always be undone by selfish individualism. Mr E just doesn't want to be told what to do.
Extras.
As ever with Arrow Films they really load you up with extras and there's quality as well as quantity. The snippets of Jewison's commentary I heard were, to be honest, a bit dull (there's also one with writer William Harrison that I haven't tried) but the five featurettes are all good value. There's a 25 minute Making Of documentary from 2001; a 7 minute short feature tracing the links between Rollerball and Roman gladiator ring that was made to accompany its release; an interview with James Caan; and two brand new features one revisiting the Munich locations used in the film and an interview with stuntman Craig R. Baxley. Not always that keen on behind the scenes films but these were all really engaging and if you want to know, during the Baxley feature there is opportunity to freeze frame and read the complete Rollerball rule book. There's also an accompanying booklet with pictures and essays on the film.
