Tag Archives: 70s American cinema

Rollerball

Rollerball
Rollerball

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 23 March 2015

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Norman Jewison

Writer: William Harrison

Cast: James Caan, John Houseman, Maud Adams

USA 1975

125 mins

Very few sports movies seem to have ever captured the reality or the spirit of their chosen discipline, lacking the spontaneity, poetry or sheer physicality of athletes in action. Perhaps it is for this reason that Norman Jewison’s 1975 classic Rollerball, a hybrid sci-fi movie, manages to stand out, as the theatricality of a sport, extreme in its violence and constructed wholly as a media spectacle, focuses the issues away from the game, to instead unravel the minutiae at the heart of corporate power and ownership.

Similarly, while so many of its sci-fi contemporaries were concerning themselves with a nihilistic vision of the future marred by genetic mutation, technological meltdown or nuclear holocaust, Rollerball’s dystopian vision seems less fantastic and closer to home, grounded in the all too real world of conglomerate hierarchies and media ratings.

In his seminal text on the Western genre, film critic André Bazin, citing Claude Lévi-Strauss, muses that myths are seldom a commentary about the time in which they are set, but always a commentary about the time in which they are told; a theme superbly underlined in Brian Henderson’s reading of John Ford’s The Searchers and which can easily be applied in an analysis of Rollerball, made in an era where the now ubiquitous relationship between sports and media began to truly establish itself.

As the 1970s saw a dip in the popularity of the Western as the all-American genre, new frontiers, buoyed by the success of the US space programme, ushered in a host of spectacular, FX-based, science-fiction movies. Journeying beyond the stars became the staple of action-packed blockbusters towards the latter part of the decade, offering American audiences, in part, a modern-day interpretation of ‘Manifest Destiny’ (an integral theme of the Western), as the nation sought to re-establish its self-esteem heading toward the onset of the Reagan (a space cowboy if ever there was one) era.

However, a decidedly more dystopian vision of the future was projected in a number of Earth-based sci-fi movies earlier on in the decade, born largely out of American disillusionment and insecurity, as the first generation of baby-boomers came of age and felt increasingly disenfranchised from the ‘silent majority’. Films set in a not too distant or unrecognisable future, such as Soylent Green (1973), Westworld (1973), Death Race 2000 (1975) and Logan’s Run (1976) all call into question the social structures we live under and the ideological institutions which govern them, yet Rollerball, under the astute guidance of Jewison, emerges as the most prophetic of these films and arguably any film of its generation.

Focusing on the game’s star player, Jonathan E (James Caan), the film can be easily read as an individual stance against capitalist power structures, as Jonathan resists the pressure heaped upon him to retire by the Energy Corporation, owners of his Houston team. Rather like Maximus in Gladiator, his accumulating status/power as an individual stem from the game’s global popularity, undermining the role of the media (along with widespread recreational drug use) as a means of providing an overpopulated planet with the circus, if not the bread, to keep things in check.

The rules of the game are simple: two teams of ten (complete with motorbike riders) compete for the possession of a metal ball, projected at high speed around the rim of a circular track. The team in possession of the ball attempt to score by placing the ball into a cone-shaped goal, while the defending team try to prevent this at all costs. Houston play three games, in a global league, throughout the course of the film, against Madrid, Tokyo and finally New York, in a world where federal ideas of nationhood have diminished altogether, as each team is representative of a corporate city-state, recalling the Olympian clashes of ancient Greece.

While the rules and aesthetics of Rollerball seem to be an amalgam of the four major US indigenous sports (baseball, basketball, gridiron and ice hockey) plus the outlandish spectacle of roller derby, the layout of the track is arguably the most telling feature of the game. With a silver ball, shot around the perimeter, ready to be taken up by any one of the numbered players, seen from above, one cannot help but make the analogy with roulette, not a sport but a game of chance, gambling, with human beings as the currency.

With each game comes a further reduction of the already scant rules, in a vain attempt to dethrone Jonathan and up the TV ratings, until in the final game no rules or time limit exist at all. Refusing to back down, Jonathan, with a rapidly diminishing cohort of friends, still manages to stand firm against the system without ever succumbing to the kill-or-be-killed mentality that seems to be his destiny.

Despite Jonathan’s radical stance in the film, he nevertheless operates within the traditional patriarchal movie framework, an archetypal Hollywood hero, rebellious and outside the rules of the system, a loner like the cowboys of old (he lives in a ranch-style house and wears a Stetson and cowboy boots). Within this framework comes the film’s one weak point, as the complete absence of any positive female roles not only reaffirms patriarchal hierarchy, but the total commodification of all the female characters is never challenged, their only currency seemingly their bodies and their deceit.

Jonathan’s enhanced status, at the end of the film, as an individual against the controlling powers of the system, is to some extent reminiscent of Tommy Smith and John Carlos, utilising their success at the 68 Olympics in Mexico to highlight the plight of African-Americans at home within the full glare of the media spotlight. Filmed partly on location in Munich, only three years after the tragedy of the 72 Olympics hostage disaster, during the height of the Cold War sporting rivalry between the US and the USSR, Rollerball is a chilling reminder that not only do sports and politics mix, they are seldom ever separated.

This review was first published in the autumn 08 print issue of Electric Sheep Magazine.

Joel Karamath

Foxy Brown

Foxy Brown
Foxy Brown

Format: Blu-ray + SteelBook

Release date: 24 June 2013

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Jack Hill

Writer: Jack Hill

Cast: Pam Grier, Antonio Fargas, Peter Brown, Terry Carter

USA 1974

92 mins

In 1985, American cartoonist Alison Bechdel proposed a test that most films would still fail. ‘I have this rule see,’ says an unnamed character in Bechdel’s strip Dykes to Watch Out For, ‘I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man.’ In her 2009 book One-Dimensional Woman, Nina Power quotes science fiction writer Charles Stross’s provocative suggestion that even more films would be struck out if the third requirement was extended to include marriage and babies. ‘What is so frightening about women talking to each other,’ asks Power, ‘without the mediation of their supposed interest in men/marriage/babies?’

Jack Hill’s Foxy Brown (1974) is, today, a film more spoken of than seen – largely due to the patronage of professional film geeks like Quentin Tarantino. But despite the obvious star power of its lead Pam Grier, whose charisma is apparent in every scene she so effortlessly steals, Foxy Brown deserves far more respect than its reputation as a female Shaft. This is a film with tense pre-fight stand-offs worthy of a Sergio Leone western and a sense of criminal conspiracy implicating the highest echelons comparable to the contemporaneous paranoid thrillers of Alan Pakula and Sidney Pollack. It is likewise notable for a depiction of racism and racial exploitation that is at all times explicitly institutionally grounded and historically situated. Apart from anything else, few films – and even fewer films made at that time by male directors – pass the Bechdel Test with such flair.

The beau of Foxy herself is disposed of in the first act. From then on, male characters are always at best pathetic losers and at worst psychopathic sadists, the only exceptions being the Black Panther-worshipping neighbourhood watch committee, who ride in like the cavalry in the final act. Fortunately, the women in this film are more than capable of taking care of everything – from business to justice – by themselves. Even when Foxy Brown is (literally) castrating one of the bad guys, it is only in order to send a message to another woman. In a reversal of the normal cinematic situation in which a female body is reduced to an object of symbolic exchange between men; here it is the phallus which becomes pure sign value in an exchange between women.

But if sex becomes a medium of exchange – whether as in the previously mentioned member in a bottle or the way prostitution is here presented as a crucial link between the drug trade and political power – what of work itself? Foxy Brown famously has no job, a consequence of the fact that the film was originally written as a sequel to Coffy (in which Pam Grier’s character is a nurse) only for the producers to change their mind too late for extensive rewrites. Yet, the film has a surprising amount to say about the question of labour.

There is Foxy’s brother, Link Brown (Antonio Fargas) complaining about the lack of employment options for a black man in America (a speech inspired by James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time). Even more telling, however, is a line that serves no narrative purpose whatsoever, spoken by a nameless character, and which seems at first to bear little relation to any of the rest of the action. “Working in a factory’s no life,’ says one woman to another in a bar, ‘It turns you into a fucking machine. I’m a god damn lady. I don’t need to be a fucking machine.’ It’s a normal rule of thumb in script editing that any line that doesn’t need to be there be cut. Yet again, this line serves no plot function, nor does it develop character. It very superfluity points paradoxically to something essential.

On the one hand, this could be director Jack Hill himself, complaining about the industrial grind of working for Corman’s American International Pictures (the DVD commentary is pretty much entirely taken up by Hill’s complaints about his lack of control over the picture and disrespectful treatment at the hands of the studio). But even more, Foxy Brown is a film about how prostitution instrumentalises and industrialises sex – and how capitalism makes prostitution the paradigm of all labour, such that we all find ourselves turning into fucking machines.

Robert Barry

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Scarecrow

scarecrow2
Scarecrow

Format: Cinema

Release date: 26 April 2013

Distributor: Park Circus

Director: Jerry Schatzberg

Writer: Garry Michael White

Cast: Al Pacino, Gene Hackman

USA 1973

112 mins

The road movie genre and the vast geographical and often turbulent social landscape of the United States of America have, over the years, proved endlessly fertile territory for filmmakers, writers and actors alike. Counter-culture dropouts, anti-heroes (and heroines), warring families, dispossessed loners and happy-go-lucky friends have travelled the length and breadth of the US on journeys always as emotionally affecting as they are literal, whatever the destinations or eventual narrative resolutions. The late 1960s and early 1970s in particular saw a spate of such movies, an entirely understandable outcome given the radical social upheavals of the era, with the likes of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson,1970) rubbing contemporaneous shoulders with Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express (1974), Vanishing Point (Richard Sarafian, 1971) and Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973).

Amid these releases, Jerry Schatzberg, fresh from directing a young Al Pacino as Bobby in The Panic in Needle Park (1971), gave audiences his own take on the genre in the shape of the Palme d’Or winning Scarecrow. Again featuring Pacino, this time as Francis Lionel ‘Lion’ Delbuchi, a good natured but emotionally immature ex-sailor, alongside Gene Hackman as volatile ex-convict Max Millan, Scarecrow ‘s narrative journey follows the path of those on the margins of society. Working-class drifters rather than counter-culture rebels, Lion and Max, one a bundle of naïvety, energy and humour, the other ill-tempered, uptight and world weary, are both searching for something, anything, to give their lives direction. Hoboing their way from California to Pittsburgh, where Max dreams of opening a car wash, the apposite personalities (exemplified by Pacino and Hackman’s contrasting acting styles) come to have a profound effect on each other during their sometimes comedic, other times brutal, experiences. Lion and Max’s adult coming-of-age journeys become inextricably linked as their buddy-movie partnership is tested both by outside forces and their own, very recognizable, human foibles.

Dust bowl landscapes, railroad sidings, flea-pit bars, roadside diners, correctional facilities and industrial wastelands on the outskirts of cities are the environments inhabited by Lion and Max, aptly mirroring their outsider status. The spaces and places traversed and visited are peopled by non-professional extras and stunningly captured in widescreen by Vilmos Zsigmond, who would later shoot Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977), The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978) and Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) among many others. Issues surrounding the American Dream, adult responsibilities, social status and masculinity are filtered through Lion and Max’s changing relationship, with Garry Michael White’s impressive debut screenplay giving Pacino and Hackman plenty of scope for impassioned monologues and quick-fire, semi-improvised dialogue interplay. Schatzberg directs in a loose-limbed fashion that fits the unsettled, scatter-shot lifestyles of his central protagonists. Short snappy vignettes flow into longer, sprawling sequences with overt comedy interrupted by outbursts of violence, reflective melancholy, casual cruelty and genuine tenderness.

Now forty years after its original release, Schatzberg’s sprawling drama has been fully digitally restored and plays for two weeks at the BFI during April and May. With its two peerless leads delivering riveting performances, this snapshot of the landscape of early 1970s America – external and internal – is a fine entry into the road movie canon.

Neil Mitchell

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Rolling Thunder

Rolling Thunder

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 30 January 2011

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: John Flynn

Writers: Paul Schrader, Heywood Gould

Cast: William Devane, Tommy Lee Jones, Linday Haynes

USA 1977

95 mins

‘Once you take out the perverse pathology of these characters, rather than becoming films about fascism they become fascist films, and that’s what happened to Rolling Thunder.’ ~ Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Rolling Thunder (1977).

A few lines before this statement (which is true) in the book Schrader on Schrader, the screenwriter remarks that in the mid-70s he was writing screenplays at a fantastic rate because he was so full of ideas. Which one could, if one felt inclined, regard a little sceptically, since Rolling Thunder is in many ways the same idea as Taxi Driver, Schrader’s most acclaimed script: a Vietnam veteran goes on a campaign of vigilante violence culminating in a massacre in a whorehouse.

The differences here lie in the talents involved and the respect shown to the story: re-writing has purged both William Devane’s character in Rolling Thunder and Robert De Niro’s in Taxi Driver of their most overt racism, but Scorsese works with what he’s got to vividly evoke the prejudices of his protagonist. There’s a fascinating push-pull of attraction-repulsion to this psychotic protagonist, which makes some people uncomfortable, but at least shows minds working behind the camera.

Rolling Thunder is an altogether less thoughtful piece. John Flynn, the director, did make the commendable The Outfit (1973), with Robert Duvall and a rogue’s gallery of vintage film noir faces, which is one of the better attempts to put Richard Stark’s psychopath-hero Parker on screen, but the unreflective approach to the material in Rolling Thunder robs it of the chance to live up to its predecessor. Tarantino is a fan of its no-nonsense kick-ass attitude, but I must confess I was disappointed by the ending, in which the protagonists murder a building full of people, and we are left with no clue as to what the attitude of law enforcement is going to be. It’s typical of QT to be enthused by inventively violent, empty movies, and so I suppose a flick where a guy loses a hand in a garbage disposal grinder and then sharpens his hook so he can rip up his persecutors would appeal. And I’m not unsympathetic to the visceral appeal of those elements, but I want more.

Devane, no De Niro, is nevertheless effective, his dark little eyes as unrevealing with or without aviator glasses. But whenever his buddy Tommy Lee Jones is on screen, we get a glimpse of a far more disturbing film: that thousand-yard stare speaks of true alienation and death-wish drive. Linda Haynes is affecting and natural as the girlfriend Devane takes with him on his Peckinpah-inflected Mexican mission of madness, and it’s a shame to see her dropped from the plot, especially after she’s demonstrated the required sharp-shooting skills. An interview included as extra feature catches up with Haynes today.

The overall feeling is of a violent, nonsensical movie that happens to contain more intelligently filmed or played moments than you’d expect. The structure is peculiar, which suits the unpredictable 70s vibe, but the assumptions underlying it are, as Schrader says, extremely dubious: the Mexican characters are all sleazy stereotypes, and of all Devane’s opponents, only the white Texan shows any competence or intelligence. Once on his mission, Devane is able to get anything he wants by torturing or intimidating his enemies, and this works - nobody thinks to lie to him. And the inciting incident, the vicious attack that sets him on his path, is terribly unconvincing: having heard he has $2000, four thugs come to his house to get it, somehow correctly assuming that he won’t have banked it. These guys are willing to torture and kill for what will divide up into 500 bucks a head: desperadoes indeed.

David Cairns