Six Flags Revisited

This site’s title has not, so far, had much of a direct bearing on the movies I’ve chosen to review. I borrowed, or stole, it from S.J. Perelman, a great humor writer responsible for the screenplays to several Marx Brothers films and countless short pieces published in The New Yorker. In the “Cloudland Revisited” essays he describes making return trips to the books and movies that had obsessed him at a younger age, invariably finding that in the interim the bloom had come off. This is a common enough mode of writing today, but, when coming from the Underwood of someone who was born in 1904, is intriguingly unfamiliar in including such subjects as J.M. Barrie’s "The Admirable Crichton," the novel of Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik, and Erich von Stroheim’s scandal-mongering silent melodrama Foolish Wives (1922), all from what now looks like the dawn of modern pop culture.
Going back to the 1970s disaster movie Rollercoaster is not exactly like revisiting Cloudland for me, since even on my first viewing it seemed decidedly unimpressive. What can’t be denied, much as I might wish to, is that for a time my obsession with the movie rivaled anything Pereleman describes. I certainly didn’t have his excuse of being caught up in universal enthusiasms. This saga of mad bombers and amusement parks was never a flavor of the month, even when it came out in the July of 1977. Just a short time after Star Wars’ release, this was an especially inauspicious moment for a movie that must have looked as instantly dated as yesteryear’s leisure suit. Certainly by the era of VHS, it was largely forgotten, hardly a staple of the era’s mom-and-pop video stores. Inexplicably, however, this insignificant blip of a movie received four-and-a-half stars in the consumer video guide my family owned, not Leonard Maltin’s book, but the lesser-known, annually released “Video Movie Guide” by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter. Somehow, reading that Rollercoaster featured “great action, crisp dialogue and a brilliant, nail-biting climax” (yes, I still have a copy of the Guide) convinced my grade-school aged self that this was a great movie, sure to become my favorite movie, if only I could get a chance to see it. Eventually, my father found a copy at the old Tower Records on Route 17 in New Jersey, the one used as the location for the gym in Burn After Reading. I can still remember the excitement of tearing away wrapping paper from the cassette box, and, swiftly following after, the mingled disappointment, embarrassment and denial of watching the tape, my school friends all gathered around, and realizing, “This is terrible.”
Rollercoaster shares the basic template of its plot with one of the best popcorn films to come out of Hollywood during the 1970s or, for that matter, in any other decade, Jaws (1975). That’s not surprising in that both movies came out of Universal, famously one of the more conservative studios of that atypically risk-embracing era of Hollywood history. The shared narrative hook is to begin with showing people at leisure, and then put them in the way of some improbable but formidable threat: a great white shark haunting beaches in Jaws, a deranged but intelligent psychopath (Timothy Bottoms) blowing up amusement parks in Rollercoaster. Then, you introduce an ostentatiously average, ordinary guy to combat the threat. George Segal's performance of this role for Rollercoaster, as Harry Calder, a safety inspector who catches onto the mad bomber’s plan, is no challenge to Roy Scheider’s iconic turn in Jawsas Chief Brody, but it’s still the most pleasing, and pleasantly ‘70s, aspect of the movie, setting it apart from the smug condescension that 1980s comedies and thrillers often displayed through their alpha-male heroes.
Rollercoaster is not, however, much of an argument for the virtues of ‘70s cinema. If anything, it suggests why so many audiences preferred the kind of slick B-movies, pioneered by 1970s “Movie Brats” like Lucas, Spielberg and Friedkin, that filled theaters through the next decade. The early 1970s equivalent to those films was the disaster movies, like The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), a genre to which Rollercoaster was a late addition. Universal carried over the gimmick of Sensurround, the enhanced sound system it had developed for Earthquake (1974), and later used in Midway (1976). After figuring out these technical specs, and securing the cooperation of amusement parks to use as shooting locations, the filmmakers behind Rollercoaster seem to have decided their job was essentially done. For a supposed thriller, it’s a remarkably slow-paced and uneventful, parceling out small portions of suspense and action to the audience like the workhouse cook in "Oliver Twist" ladling out soup to the orphans. As a kid, I imagined scenes like the mine tunnel chase in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom , the hero and villain battling each other atop a speeding rollercoaster, only to discover that the “production value” on display in the film mainly consisted of documentary footage of rollercoasters. It seems intended mostly as an audiovisual substitute for the actual experience of riding on one, presumably for people who’ve never had such an opportunity but do happen to notice Rollercoaster playing at the local theater.
Re-watching the film recently, I could better appreciate that it was geared toward slow-burning suspense rather than the “adrenaline-packed thrill ride” of something like Speed. Even taken on this level, however, it doesn’t really work. After an opening, ghastly scene of Timothy Bottoms derailing a rollercoaster at Ocean View Park, the movie settles into a rhythm that’s less quietly tense than somnolent. On those infrequent occasions when the villain does threaten the other characters, Rollercoaster suggests a daytime TV show trying to rouse itself from a late afternoon nap. Not surprisingly, many of the people who worked on the movie were either coming from or going back to television careers. Director James Goldstone worked on some notable early "Star Trek" episodes and innumerable other shows, as well as theatrical assignments like the Jimmy Breslin adaptation The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, with an early De Niro role, and the Irwin Allen-produced flop When Time Ran Out… that failed to raise him above the level of a director for hire. Screenwriters Richard Levinson and William Link share between them several hundred writing credits on my grandmother’s favorite show, "Murder, She Wrote," which might say something about why this movie isn't as good as The Conversation (1974) or The Parallax View (1974). Cinematographer David M. Walsh’s name, meanwhile, appears on many other seventies films, from Silver Streak (1976) to California Suite (1978), all sporting the same flatly shot, drearily TV-like visual style.
My sense of Rollercoaster as an ill-fated artifact of a period in Hollywood about to be swept away by the brighter, faster work of the Movie Brats is lent credence by its casting. This is one of George Segal’s last appearances as a functioning movie star (Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe (1978) being another), after which he vanished from theater screens for most of the eighties. Though far inferior to the material he had in movies like Irvin Kershner’s Loving (1970) and California Split (1974), his role here gives a good sense of the warmly likeable, understated presence that made him a star. Timothy Bottoms, who’d become a star with the great The Last Picture Show (1970), was about to experience a similar professional vanishing act, taking on lower-profile roles before resurfacing recently with a startlingly convincing impersonation of the motivational speaker George W. Bush. His mad bomber sticks closely and convincingly, if unsurprisingly, to the Norman Bates model of the well-mannered, quiet psychopath.
Though the story, such as it is, consists of the contest between the two men, Rollercoaster fills out its cast enough to qualify as a “box” movie, the kind that would showcase the stars’ faces lined up in little portraits at the bottom of the poster or the video box cover. Henry Fonda’s appearance here is the most obviously gratuitous, playing Segal’s boss in several scenes too brief for him to do anything but play Henry Fonda. Richard Widmark has the larger role of the FBI agent who supervises the investigation into the mad bomber, in which he generally seems stiff. Susan Strasberg, as Segal’s girlfriend, and a young Helen Hunt, as his kid, appear to be serving the thankless function of being placed in peril for his sake, but then are not even afforded that dubious distinction.

Looking at the roster of great and lesser talents that contributed to Rollercoaster, it’s hard to imagine that any of them ever expected so much of the film as I did. Viewed now, years after my original disappointment, Rollercoaster doesn’t seem crushingly awful so much as utterly disposable. The dated qualities that prevented my younger self from enjoying it now seem almost endearing, in the way of something that could have only been made at a particular time. It’s as charmingly awkward as the clothing and hairstyles in your parents’ prom photos. Bad movies like this one have their own part, however little their makers may have recognized it at the time, to play in the love of film.