Film review: Rollerball (1975)

This film holds a special place in my heart because it was one of two films that I saw after school projected using an actual film projector in the classroom we usually met for my "house" meetings (and once we listened to David Suchet explain Shylock to us).  The other film was Life of Brian, so Rollerball had a lot to live up to.  But in the opinion of my sci-fi obsessed early-teen self, it did - it was totally awesome!  So when I saw it included in the Criterion Channel's "70's Sci Fi" collection, I had to see if it held up.  And it sort of did.  Here's the gist: James Caan

(excellent - this was the first thing I ever saw him as, so unlike 99% of people who've heard of James Caan, I don't think of him as Sonny Corleone) is Jonathan E, the sort of Michael Jordan of the futuristic (well, it's set in 2018!) sport of Rollerball, which is sort of like Roller Derby but with motorbikes

and a steel ball and is so plausibly entertaining of a fictional sport that the crew actually played it when not shooting the movie, and the director, Norman Jewison (director of Fiddler on the Roof and Moonstruck!) fielded many, many offers to turn it into a real sport with actual franchises.  However, part of the point of the movie is that it's a terrible sport (it's a sign of how degraded society has become that they watch this kind of thing) so he refused.  A loss to us all, say I.  Anyway, there are three main Rollerball games interspersed throughout the movie, all of them featuring Jonathan and his orange-clad champion Houston team.  The first one is against a European team (I think it's Milan) and is fairly tame by Rollerball standards in that nobody dies.  But then the real point of the movie starts to emerge.  The idea is that the world is run by corporations now (at the start of each contest everyone has to rise for the "corporation anthem") and they control every aspect of people's lives, and distract them with gaudy shows like Rollerball.  They also control Jonathan's life - they provide him with female companionship, for example, but he is pining for his former wife (played by Maud Adams) who was "taken away" by a corporation hotshot.  Jonathan is getting on in years, and a big boss played by Paper Chase actor John Houseman tries to convince him to retire.  He doesn't want to, and doesn't quite understand why anyone would want him to.  The answer is that the point of Rollerball had always been to convince the masses that the individual could not succeed by himself and had to work as a team, but Jonathan had become too big for his britches and destroyed the message.  So, in order to eliminate him, the rules are gradually stripped away from the game, and it becomes more and more lethal.  The second matchup is Houston versus Tokyo, and you get some excellent (albeit absurdly stereotyped) karate-esque action from the Tokyo squad,

which results in Jonathan's main buddy on the team, "Moonpie" ending up in a persistent vegetative state.  The final matchup has no rules and no time limit, and goes until everyone is dead or crippled.  This one's in New York, appropriately enough - if you can make it there...

And you can guess who is the lone survivor, skating around the track as everyone chants his name as the movie ends...
Interspersed between the excellent action scenes are lots of scenes of Jonathan moping around, attending decadent parties that no longer interest him, being visited by his ex-wife and getting mad when she tries to get him to retire, and going to (I think) Venice, where there is a big library curated by Ralph Richardson (in an insultingly small role) and one of those mad talking computers that were everywhere in 70s sci-fi.  So the background message is kind of Ayn Randian: the extraordinary individual must rise above the attempts to crush his exceptionalism, and of course, Jonathan does.  But the set designs are great, Caan underplays it very nicely (he's convincing as an inarticulate Texan jock) and it's drenched in Top Classical Hits like Toccata in Fugue and Albinoni's Adagio, so it doesn't have a super-dated synth score, as it might well have done.  I can see why teenaged me liked it so much (as the Randian implications would have partly flown over my head and partly appealed to the me-against-the-world feeling of every teen).  And one odd scene had stuck with me, where a set of drunk/stoned party guests stumble out into the countryside holding a weird pistol and proceed to fire it at a row of trees, setting each of them ablaze in turn.  Probably means something, but now I was just sad that they set perfectly good trees on fire to make this film.