Rollerball

In 2018 corporate capitalism has abolished war , sickness and poverty and the masses of the human race watch Rollerball a violent sport . The world's greatest star of the sport Jonathan E finds himself being manipulated by a global corporate company

Believe it or not after THE GODFATHER films were released it wasn't Pacino or DeNiro who was going to be the biggest star from the films but James Caan . As ridiculous as it may seem now you can understand that his manly , rugged all American physical features would be ready made for New Hollywood unlike the somewhat ethnic background of Pacino and DeNiro . As it turned those two Italian Americans became two of the greatest actors of their generation while Caan quickly disappeared in obscure forgotten films like FREEBIE AND THE BEAN and THE KILLER ELITE . This film by Norman Jewison ROLLERBALL was probably Caan's career highlight

ROLLERBALL is another dystopian science fiction film popular from the period where the future vision of humanity has seen the upside where war , illness and poverty has been eradicated . The downside is that with it individuality and democracy has effectively become a thing of the past too and world is ruled not by democratically elected governments but by corporate companies who control the population by giving them what they want but on the corporate terms

This is a persuasive idea and one that's not really exaggerated . George Orwell described sport as " War without the shooting " and as someone who grew up in the west of Scotland I can testify that most peoples obsession revolves around two football clubs Rangers and Celtic who attract a lot of sectarian pond life and there's a blackly comical joke that there's only six letters in the West of Scotland alphabet - IRA and UVF , so the idea of corporate companies controlling the masses wasn't a ridiculous idea when this film was made

The problem is that the message is a bit too heavy handed to be entirely credible . It's true that people belong to tribes and this never truer than where sport is concerned but you have to think why would a sport like Rollerball make headway in to Europe or South America where football or soccer as it is known in America be the world's most popular game . Likewise would Rollerball be popular in the third world like Africa or Asia or any failed state ? The more you think about the premise collapses that the concept of war and poverty has been abolished

Where the film works best is the scenes of the game itself . I'm not entirely sure what the rules of the game are but it's certainly an exciting sport that might best be described as " carnage porn " . Director Jewison tries hard to make the game scenes spontaneous via the use of editing and sound mix and probably tries a bit too hard to make it appear spontaneous but the action scenes are exciting and it's this that makes the film a success . Compare it to the wimpish remake from ten years ago to see what I mean