Rollerball (1975)

Directed by Norman Jewison. Starring James Caan, John Houseman, John Beck, Maud Adams, Moses Gunn, Pamela Hensley, Barbara Trentham, Shane Rimmer, Ralph Richardson. [R]

In the not-too-distant future, the most popular sport in the world is rollerball, a violent game played between teams of skating gladiators who look to score points and bludgeons, all to the frothing ecstasy of the crowd. Superstar Caan commands the adulation of those crowds, which displeases chairman Houseman; he wants Caan to retire, but Caan refuses, and the game becomes even more savage with the elimination of penalties and substitutions. Simplistic as satire, and the moral is pounded into the skull as hard as one of the players’ spiked gloves; derivative depiction of corporatized future society, with one especially heavy-handed sequence showing the idle rich delighting in blowing things up during a party using a high-tech weapon. The most exciting scenes are found in the rollerball arena, which was not the indictment of brutal contact sports Jewison was going for—he was appalled by (and rejected) all offers from promoters wanting the rights to the game to start a real-life league—but they’re still crisply photographed and edited, and “acted” with macho gusto. Remade in 2002.

55/100