Bone In The Fan

The future, 1976-style.

I’ll tell you how tough.  Last night I caught a bit of the original version of Rollerball on television.  If you haven’t seen it, Rollerball was one of those movies that came along in the seventies that tried to make incisive observations and predictions about society and violence.  There was a raft of them in the seventies;  A Clockwork Orange, Network, Westworld, Rollerball, and even Death Race 2000 spring to mind off the top of my head, though the quality of each might vary a bit.

Any social commentary or life lessons the filmmakers wanted to impart were completely lost on me when the films came out, but I thought there was nothing cooler than the futuristic settings and rad violence (I remember seeing A Clockwork Orange for the first time as an adult and thinking “holy shit, it’s not just ass kicking and sex - this movie is actually good”).  Obviously Network bored the crap out of me, Faye Dunaway, William Holden and the famous “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” scene notwithstanding; no naked boobies and no fights? What the hell was I even doing at that stupid film? (Answer: my short-lived friendship with a fellow thirteen-year-old boy named Alexis netted exactly 4 memorable experiences:  1, visiting his house and having him tell me that I needed to take off my shoes before going in his room so I didn’t get the rug dirty.  2, going with him and his mother to a taping of the game show $10,000 Pyramid to see an aspiring actor friend of his mom’s try for the ten grand.  The unknown-at-the-time actor’s name was Frank Langella and he lost, though I doubt he’s still losing sleep over it.  3, Going to see Network with him and his mom.  4 - Going to see Carrie with him and his mom.  Alexis liked his mom, I liked R-rated movies.  Neither of us could stand each other after about a week).

Evil James Houseman juxtaposed with flames. Even Oliver Stone would call this heavy-handed.

The others though, I loved.  A Clockwork Orange had the Anthony Burgess book as source material, Beethoven as a soundtrack, and the mighty Malcolm MacDowell wearing a fake eyelash, kicking the crap out of people and saying shit like “a bit of the old ultra-violence”.  Westworld had creepy robots and Yul Brenner (as a rogue creepy robot) wasting tourists with a six-gun.  Death Race 2000 didn’t take itself nearly as seriously as the rest and had a ridiculous Paul Bartel script, a post “Kung Fu” David Carradine, and Sylvester Stallone as Machine Gun Joe Viterbo running people over during a cross country race (the “campiness” was lost on me of course; I just wanted to see people get mowed down by the cars). And Rollerball had James Caan playing a character named just Jonathan E, guys on skates getting towed around a futuristic roller derby track by motorcycles and kicking the crap out of each other, and James Houseman heading up the evil cabal of gray men that ran the world.

High school football in the afternoon, S&M roller disco at night, one outfit.

The thing about Rollerball though is that whoever was in charge of designing the scenes where they actually played Rollerball completely screwed the pooch.  Here we’re in the most dramatic portions of the movie, where everything comes to a head, and nothing looks remotely futuristic. From the old-school roller derby track to the crappy motorcycle bodywork to the uniforms, those scenes were just big sound stages full of suck (see photo above).

But. Even in that ridiculous setting, wearing something that looked like a cross between a high-school football uniform  (complete with number lifted from the LED display of a mid-seventies digital Timex) and something you’d wear to S&M Roller Disco night at the Roxy in 1976 , James Caan STILL looked like a total fucking badass.

That’s how tough James Caan is.

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