Rollerball (1975)

No, not the lame Chris Klein version, the awesome James Caan version (dir. Norman Jewison, from a short story by William Harrison). This film has the hairy-chested Caan competing in a game created by the corporations which also rule the entire world—ROLLERBALL! The sport is intended to channel spectatorial aggression, so that the people of the world don't rise up against the autocrats with big bushy eyebrows who pull all the strings of their lives. Caan's character, Jonathan E., is a rollerball *star*, and that worries the corprocrats, because if there can be stars, then the concept of individual achievement is still dangerously alive.

The thing that I thought this movie does well is the non-sports stuff - the seventies futuristic world of luxury that Jonathan E. inhabits, where gorgeous women with major cheekbones and long, flowing dresses appear at his ranch house to service him and spy on him for the Energy corporation; where the pretty people who surround Jonathan get together at night-long debauched parties to take unnamed pills and incinerate pine trees with flamethrowing pistols; where living room decor features giant leather couch-beds and crystal globes, etc. etc. I'll leave it to Nick to hopefully elaborate on the radicalism of the plot, which really is pretty anti-business. I can't imagine that the Klein version is the same, though I haven't seen it. Yet.