ROLLERBALL (1975)

Director: Norman Jewison

Writer: William Harrison adapting his 1973 short story “Roller Ball Murder”

Producer: Norman Jewison

Cast: James Caan, John Houseman, John Beck, Moses Gunn, Maud Adams, Barbara Trentham, Pamela Hensley, Shane Rimmer, Ralph Richardson, Robert Ito, Richard LeParmentier, Burt Kwouk, Nancy Blieier, John Normington, (and uncredited cast members) Craig R. Baxley, Steve Boyum, Jimmy Berg, Tony Brubaker, Walter Scott, Bob Minor, Robert Dancel, Alan Hamane, Danny Wong, Eddie Kubo, Bob Leon, Burnell Tucker, Angus MacInnes, Dick Enberg, Bob Miller, Byron Morrow, Anthony Chinn, Sarah Douglas, Valli Kemp, Yasuko Nagazumi, Robert Lee, Mac MacDonald

In the future, the world is controlled by six major corporations. Each corporation has its own rollerball sports team. Rollerball is a brutal variation on roller derby that includes aspects of football, hockey, and motocross. The greatest champion in the sport is the captain of the Houston team, Jonathan E (James Caan). After ten years in the sport, the famous and celebrated Jonathan E. is being pressured to retire by Mr. Bartholomew (John Houseman), the CEO of the Energy Corporation that owns the Houston team. As Jonathan continues to resist retirement, the rules of rollerball are changed to increase the danger of the game.

The Flashback Fanatic movie review

Rollerball is a dystopian science fiction film that speculates more about the trajectory of society than the advance of technology. It has concerns that are even more relevant today half a century after it was made. We not only are shown how the public mania for sports can devolve into mindless enthusiasm for barbarity, but also how that diversion can distract the masses from the corporate puppet masters pulling all of civilization’s strings.

Canadian director and producer Norman Jewison was struck by how the sport of hockey was being promoted on television in the United States. Jewison felt that “highlights” of the body checking and fights were being shown to promote the game as a blood sport. He found that emphasis repulsive and set out to make Rollerball a film condemning violence in sports. Jewison was just as offended when he was approached to get the rights to the game of rollerball for the development of an actual professional rollerball league.

The film’s thrilling rollerball action was performed by the actors and stuntmen on an actual track built in a Munich, Germany sports arena. The sport of rollerball was devised in its entirety with rules that make the scenes shot during the game seem to have a practical justification. Regardless of its brutality, this is a credible athletic competition being depicted. Since this bloodsport seems all too believable, we are not distanced by fantasy elements that give us a comfort zone to avoid grappling with the morality of such a nasty spectacle and its effect on society.

Director Jewison also had an even more valid concern: the ever more pervasive control of society by corporations. Fifty years later, we are seeing how a handful of CEOs are becoming ever more influential in every aspect of our lives. They provide our modern conveniences and infrastructure while exerting more control with their market pressures and monied political pull. Those concerns may be nothing new, but we seem to be accelerating into a business-as-usual mindset about such machinations.

In the world of Rollerball, corporate control has replaced politics and nationalism, which seems to have eliminated poverty and disease. Yet that corporate control must be maintained by dumbing down the masses and diminishing individuality. All human knowledge has been catalogued in a central computer. By either intent or incompetence, portions of that knowledge can be restricted or deleted. If only one corporate-directed entity is allowed to be the caretaker of humanity’s culture and history, how can people be sure that knowledge will be preserved? After all, keeping the masses ignorant makes them less independent and more easily manipulated.

As the captain of the Houston Energy team, Jonathan E. is this future world’s most revered rollerball athlete. He has distinguished himself as the greatest player of the game and is well provided for. He lives on his spacious ranch amidst beautiful scenery and is treated to a succession of lovely women assigned to him as live-in companions. Despite his fame and luxury, he is frustrated. Eventually, we learn that the only thing that ever meant anything to Jonathan, besides rollerball, was his wife, Ella (Maud Adams). She was taken away from him by a corporate executive who wanted her. Now, the only thing that Jonathan can feel any passion for is playing the game of rollerball.

Jonathan E. may have been resigned to his life of being a rollerball champion, but that personal distinction is being jeopardized by Mr. Bartholomew, the CEO of the Energy Corporation that owns his team. Mr. Bartholomew suggests it is time for Jonathan to retire. Jonathan resists this, to the growing aggravation of Mr. Bartholomew. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Jonathan is curious about how things are run by corporations. He wants to know why he is being pressured to give up the last thing in his life he is passionate about. Jonathan only finds secrecy and grows more wary about his own safety.

Aside from the camaraderie he has with his fellow rollerballers, Jonathan has no real relationships. He seems detached and frustrated when not on the rollerball track. As Jonathan, James Caan gives a performance that could be taken as disinterested, but I think that is the point of the film. Caan’s character, like all the other citizens in this future world, has been kept complacent with comfort and security. Like everyone else, he has been conditioned to accept the status quo of corporate control. It takes both the loss of his wife and the threat of being forced out of his sport to stir enough unrest in him to begin to question and resist corporate authority. I think Caan’s underplaying shows the damage that he and the rest of humanity have suffered far more effectively than a lot of snark and threats. Caan’s Jonathan E. does have a few outbursts, but these seem to take a while to build up. Jonathan is just one more victim of the mental and emotional neutering of people in this dystopia.

While there are some moments of humor and anger displayed in this film, there is a pervasive coldness to it all. The people are intellectually numb and incapable of truly engaging at an honest emotional level. This may make us have a more difficult time bonding with the characters, but I think it is a realistic indication of that loss of individuality that is the threat posed by corporate-directed conformity.