Rollerball (1975)

I think of Hollywood in the seventies as a sort of "silver age" for American cinema after the "golden age" of the Hollywood studio-system years (the 20s to the early 50s). An influx of young, film-school-trained talent, new influences from Europe and the independent film scene, and an admirable consistency in craft, style and intelligence characterizes many films in the late sixties and the first half of the seventies (Point Blank, Midnight Cowboy, Five Easy Pieces, Dog Day Afternoon, etc.), and the congenial environment for new ideas and approaches benefited many middle-of-the-road films as well, such as the one we are looking at today. It was also a fertile time for science-fiction films, as titles like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Silent Running, Planet of the Apes, Westworld, Soylent Green, THX-1138, and The Andromeda Strain injected social commentary into a view of the future that went beyond the space-suited clichés of the space-opera.

In 2018, corporations have replaced nation-states in a world order without war, poverty, or crime, and the global masses thrill to a spectator sport called rollerball, where two teams, on skates and motorbikes, vie for possession of a heavy steel ball shot onto the sharply-inclined circular track, attempting to get the ball into the opposing goal. The play is fast, exciting -- and violent: players can be hurt, crippled or killed in the normal course of play, which is part of the appeal for the game's fans. One of the world's top rollerball teams is the Houston team, sponsored by the Energy corporation and led by captain Jonathan E. (James Caan), who is the sport's longest-lived and most successful player. After a victory over Madrid, Jonathan is taken aside by Energy executive Bartholomew (John Houseman) and asked, quietly but firmly, to retire. For rollerball has an important social function: it is not a game in which individuals are supposed to matter, but a lesson in group effort over individual ambition, and Jonathan's success and fame are running counter to the intentions of the game. Jonathan, not comprehending why he should retire when he and his team are at the top of their game, refuses. While he refuses to budge and attempts to find out what he can on the corporate social order and how decisions are made, rule changes are announced, making the game much more dangerous and it becomes obvious to Jonathan that he may not leave the field alive.

Rollerball was based on a short story, "The Rollerball Murders," by William Harrison, who in his career as a professor at the University of Arkansas was engaged in research on management methods at multinational corporations, private entities many of which were dwarfing political states in economic size and power, and who conceived his story while watching the crowd at a university basketball game. Director Norman Jewison was intrigued by the story and paid Harrison for the film rights to it and to write a screenplay. In addition to the phenomenon of giant transnational corporations, Harrison and Jewison were also observing the increasing popularity of televised spectator sports and their escalating emphasis on violence, conflict, and warlike behavior on the playing field and among fans. American football, as well as ice hockey (a sport which the Canadian Jewison grew up on and came to regard with increasing ambivalence), were obvious models for rollerball, but there was also the phenomenon in Europe and especially the UK, where Jewison spent a lot of time, of soccer hooliganism, in which fans of rival clubs engaged in pitched battles in the stands and outside the arena. Another obvious comparison would be Roman gladiatorial games, the proverbial example of violence being used to placate the masses.

The two elements of Rollerball's premise -- multinational corporations and the exploitation of violence in mass media -- give the film a solid footing and a prescience which can be seen today, when the multinationals of Harrison's time have become even bigger and more powerful and popular entertainment has become even more atavistic and focused on violence. The film's visual impressions of the future, while dated in details (which comes with the territory: all films set in the future show their age at one point or another) still look great: Jewison's view of the future (designed by production designer John Box) recalls Kubrick's approach in his futuristic films 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange with their chilly formalism -- combined in the latter with visceral violence and deft editing. Like Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange, Jewison chose his locations carefully, heading to Munich where the world's largest circular sports stadium was built for cycling events at the 1972 Olympics, and where the headquarters of BMW was located. For Jonathan's trip to Geneva to consult with the world's most advanced computer, Zero, on corporate society, the old League of Nations building located there was used.

Most memorable are the game sequences, so absorbing and yet appalling that Jewison was predictably accused of what the film opposes, exploiting violence. The uniforms, based on the gear for American football -- helmets and protective pads under numbered jerseys -- were familiar to American audiences, yet subtly alienated by the alterations: the lack of mascots or logos, the nasty-looking studs on the gloves and the helmets, and the futuristic looking font of the numbers on the jerseys. The game itself was designed by Harrison and Jewison and refined by the stunt team in rehearsal, who apparently enjoyed the game so much they played it even when the cameras weren't rolling (a man in Texas who saw the film reportedly expressed interest in starting a real rollerball league). Director of cinematography Douglas Slocombe and editor Anthony Gibbs keep the action fast and furious, while the sound design prefigures the pounding, bass-heavy presentation of more recent cinema films. The violence is jarring but mostly bloodless in the hygienic style of much Hollywood violence -- a real rollerball game would undoubtedly be much bloodier.

Offsetting the film's strong concepts and the execution of its game scenes is a frequently plodding and heavy-handed narrative. Harrison and Jewison have constructed such a difficult labyrinth for their characters that Jonathan cannot form a coherent understanding of the nature of the society that he lives in. It's an age when books are nearly extinct as the world's libraries go through a process of being "transcribed" and "summarized" into electronic form: in essence, rewritten and destroyed. The Geneva sequence shows something of this process as the head librarian (Ralph Richardson in one of the film's real treats, by turns comical, surreal, and pathetic) takes him to see Zero, the central computer, while chatting to him offhandedly about that morning's loss of the entire 13th century: "just Dante and a few corrupt popes ... poor old 13th century." Living memories of pre-corporate society are vague and selective, like those of his older friend and trainer Cletus (Moses Gunn). So Jonathan cannot develop the knowledge which might lead to a coherent opposition. His personal grievances against the corporations -- the losses of his wife Ella (Maud Adams) to an executive who wanted her and used his privileges to get her, and of his friend and teammate Moonpie (John Beck), brain dead after a blow to the head on the track in Tokyo -- are classic Hollywood, in the tradition of the movie cop who only gets serious about going after the bad guys when they do something to his wife, family or worst of all, his partner.

Therefore Jonathan's main motivation ends up being, in essence, "you're not the boss of me," which leaves his defiance of the system hollow and futile, and the much-vaunted pro-individualist message of the film rather silly. And it seems rather silly of Bartholomew and his fellow executives not to see that Jonathan's success and fame aid their cause in the long run rather than threaten it, as we see in an era of disposable cults of personality, and the cultivation of "individuality" through the consumption of dress, music and politics. They (Bartholomew and his cronies, that is) have forgotten that while their drama has played out, the masses who chant Jonathan's name from the stands are still as ignorant and passive as when it began.

Further notes on the film:

• One of the film's nods to Kubrick is its classical music soundtrack by André Previn, who conducted the orchestral selections with the London Symphony Orchestra, played the organ music (the pregame's corporate anthems and hymns, as well as J. S. Bach's Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor for the title sequence), and also came up with the futuristic music (a sort of soul groove with Moog flourishes) for the party sequence which ends with the guests recklessly setting fire to trees with a flare-gun (an indictment of the decadence and indifference of the people for whom this society is run). Unfortunately the film depends heavily on Tomasso Albinoni's mawkish Adagio for Strings at the moments when it wants to really tug on the viewer's emotions, and overall lacks Kubrick's gift for choosing music for his films that was not only apposite thematically but also fresh and unexpected.

• Rollerball was remade by John McTiernan in 2002, an awful film gutted of the original's intellectual content, elegant design and even its futuristic setting, and symptomatic of the fetish for recycling old material that has gripped Hollywood in recent years.

• James Caan (b. 1939), a longtime sports and rodeo enthusiast off the set, began in films in 1963 with a bit part in Irma La Douce, but his career only took off with his appearance as Sonny Corleone in 1972's The Godfather. His star burned brightly during the seventies, dimmed in the eighties, but revived somewhat in the nineties as he began to specialize in character roles.

• John Houseman (1902-1988) was born in Bucharest to an Alsatian father and an English mother and turned to writing and the theater in the thirties, collaborating with Orson Welles on many theater projects, most famously the Mercury Theater, which spun off into radio projects and finally Citizen Kane (1941), a project over which the two men quarrelled and split. After the war he produced many distinguished films while working as producer and director for many New York stage productions and also teaching theater at Vassar. He is best known for his creation of the redoubtable Professor Kingsfield in the law-school drama The Paper Chase (1973) a role he reprised on television in the seventies and eighties. His combination of gentility, aristocratic bearing, and daunting intellectualism was used to great effect in a series of commercials for an investment firm I remember well in which he concludes "We make money the old-fashioned way ... we earn it."

• The filmography of Norman Jewison (b. 1926) is a mixed bag, ranging from romantic comedies to musicals to satire to serious dramas, though he is reputed a craftsman whatever the value of any particular project. Born in Toronto, he began his career in British, then Canadian, then American television before turning to feature films. His films include Send Me No Flowers (1964), The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming! (1966), Fiddler On The Roof (1971), Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), ... And Justice For All (1979), and Agnes Of God (1985).

I viewed Rollerball on a 1998 double-sided DVD release from MGM Home Entertainment, containing a letterboxed wide-screen version and a pan-and-scan version, featuring dialogue and subtitles in English, French and Spanish, commentary track by Norman Jewison, a featurette made at the time about the film (what we would now call an EPK or electronic press kit), an illustrated booklet, and an "exciting interactive rollergame" which turns out to involve rearranging scrambled scenes from the film into their original order ( ... fun). No trailers, teasers or stills, but what the hell; it was cheap. I understand there have since been DVD re-releases of the film which contain more material, including a commentary track by screenwriter William Harrison.