THE SCREEN:
Westerbeck, Colin L Jr.
THE SCREEN No industry devotes more executive think time to forecasting trends than the movie business does, and the current wisdom in this arcane specialty seems to have it that prognostication...
...But in John Schlesinger's new film adaptation of West's novel, Tod has been deprived of his role as Jeremiah...
...At-tempting to deliver a roundhouse punch to all civiliza-tion, the film misses and socks itself right in the puss instead...
...What we mustn't overlook in all these disaster films, for in-stance, is that they are all predictions of disasters to come...
...he was an artist, not a prophet...
...Nor do Jewison's sensibilities prove much of an im-pediment to making a conventionally slick, violent film...
...Unfortunately, having done away with "The Burning of Los Angeles," Schlesinger still permits Tod's sketches to be realized in the most literal way by a riot at the film's end...
...Since the game is supposed to demonstrate the futility of individual effort, Jonathan defeats its purpose...
...Like Jewison, in other words, Tod both is working in the movie colony and predicting an end to the civilization it represents...
...In fact Roller-ball seems so self-sufficient, self-contained a movie that it is almost self-reviewing...
...For Schlesinger is also, we feel, looking at the past in the hopes of telling us something about the near future...
...Like Jewison, though perhaps more re-luctantly, Tod thinks of himself as a prophet...
...Despite a little razzle-dazzle and grandstanding by him at the end, however, even his rebellion doesn't prove that much of a problem...
...Therefore, at the movies, as elsewhere, we are trying frantically to figure out what it is we are supposed to have learned about the day after tomorrow...
...THE SCREEN No industry devotes more executive think time to forecasting trends than the movie business does, and the current wisdom in this arcane specialty seems to have it that prognostication itself is the coming thing...
...At one point Jonathan wants to read a book and is referred to a computer which is the last repository of the world's libraries...
...It is as an essay on southern California, much more than as a novel, that West's book deserves to be remembered...
...West's dense descriptions of his characters turn them not into people, but rather into clever generalizations about people...
...More than a film about the society it depicts, Rollerball looks like something made in that society...
...The last of the many cliches which have been our response to Vietnam is that "those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it...
...Jewison's camera glides, tracks and racks focus with a lulling mindlessness that makes the movie itself into the sort of clean machine that the society in it is...
...All he really accomplishes is to remind us that the latest news of California's imminent spiritual and physical destruction is at least forty years old...
...Having been transformed first, as work for the Waterloo film, into a vision of the past, those sketches become a peculiar sort of analogue for Schlesinger's own film...
...It efficiently supplies all the metaphor necessary to describe its own inadequacy...
...Maybe Norman Jewison is just a contemporary ver-sion of the young man who is the hero in Nathaniel West's 1930s novel about Hollywood, The Day of the Locust...
...His expensive prophecy is just a version of Earthquake for intellectuals, or even worse, a retroactive Rollerball...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Though following the novel closely in other regards, Schlesinger and scriptwriter Waldo Salt have eliminated "The Burning of Los Angeles" from West's story and turned Tod's sketches for it into preparation for a rou-tine movie assignment, a costume epic about Waterloo, Tod is doing for the studio...
...Nevertheless, he refused to give up the role of Jeremiah...
...But the computer's keeper (Ralph Richardson) complains because now that all human knowledge is in the computer, the computer has become hopelessly ambiguous...
...Norman Jewison's new multi-million dollar extrava-ganza, Rollerball, suggests that what the future holds for us is a completely self-sufficient society, a society which even manages, literally, to incorporate war...
...As a consequence, like the oversized hands of a character in the novel named Homer (Donald Sutherland), all West's characters are fascinating in repose but awkward in action...
...At the end of West's novel Tod does turn out to have been Jeremiah too...
...There is a riot, and in it much of the substance of the sketches Tod has been doing for "The Burning of Los Angeles" comes to life...
...Of Tod West observed, "He told himself that...
...His work would not be judged by the accuracy with which it foretold a future event but by its merit as a painting...
...And no action in the book seems so clumsy or ill-conceived as the ending, when West attempted to palm off Tod's sketches as a real apocalypse for Tod, Homer and the girl they have been competing for, Faye Greener (Karen Black), that "tin-pan alley tune" Tod can't "get out of his head...
...That's the kind of am-biguity Jewison's film has too-the kind that, intending to say it all, ends up saying nothing...
...The only malcontent in the whole society is Rollerball's greatest superstar, Jonathan E. (James Caan), who is upset because they want him to retire...
...A studio art director who is over-educated for his work, West's hero, Tod, is also doing an epic paint-ing entitled "The Burning of Los Angeles...
...All this might be to the good, too, except that Schlesinger has denied Tod the role of Jeremiah only in order to reserve it for himself...
...This is accomplished with a game, Rollerball, which is an amalgam of roller derby, hockey, motorcycle racing and roulette...
...Indeed, even when we are being treated to a cos-tume drama set in the past, we have the feeling at the movies these days that what we are seeing is still some-how intended not as history, but as prophecy...
Vol. 102 • July 1975 • No. 9
