Douglas Slocombe Rollerball
Douglas Slocombe was sixty-two when he shot Rollerball. He had spent the late 1940s and 1950s at Ealing Studios — Dead of Night (1945), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) — and by 1974 was one of the most decorated British cinematographers of his generation. Six years after Rollerball he would shoot Raiders of the Lost Ark for Steven Spielberg, then Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade, retiring from the camera at seventy-five.
From Ealing comedies to the Servant
Slocombe came to cinematography sideways. He had been a newsreel cameraman in Poland and Holland in 1939–1940 — filming the German invasion at risk to his own life — and joined Ealing in 1942. He became a full director of photography in 1947 and over the next decade defined the visual character of the Ealing comedies: high-contrast black-and-white, flexible studio lighting, comic compositions that looked spontaneous and were precisely engineered. The Alec Guinness-as-six-Ascoynes set-piece in Kind Hearts and Coronets — six exposures of the same frame with masking on the lens — was Slocombe's technical achievement as much as Robert Hamer's.
After Ealing's collapse he moved to freelance work in the 1960s — Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963, his first BAFTA), The Italian Job (1969), The Music Lovers (1971), Travels with My Aunt (1972), The Great Gatsby (1974, his second BAFTA), and Polanski's The Tenant (1976). By the mid-1970s he was the cinematographer producers called when the picture needed both technical complexity and old-school glamour.
What Rollerball asked him to do
The arena sequences — the largest sets Slocombe had ever lit — were the central technical problem. The Rudi-Sedlmayer-Halle in Munich is a 12,000-seat space; the banked track and the surrounding crowd had to be lit at game speed, with motorcycles and skaters moving at thirty miles per hour, and with multiple cameras following the action.
In his British Entertainment History Project interview Slocombe described the central problem of Rollerball as one of scale — "huge sets with not many lights" — which he solved with high-speed stock and economical placement of the units he had. (behp)
The non-arena sequences solve a different problem. Slocombe shoots Jonathan's Texas ranch with the warm, soft, slightly hazy light of Ealing nostalgia — the look of The Titfield Thunderbolt relocated to a corporate-future hacienda. The Bartholomew white office is bleached and front-lit, almost without shadow. The Geneva archive is shot in deep blues and copper, with Ralph Richardson's face in three-point key light against a wall of pulsing tape spools. Each location has its own palette. The arena alternates between high-contrast spotlight on the players and crowd-flooded ambient blues.
"Slocombe's photography of Rollerball is stunningly done — probably one of the most visually stylish films in director Norman Jewison's filmography." — Rupert Lally, Medium / You Need to See This
"There's an excitement in doing action films. I probably enjoy them on a sort of Boy Scout level." — Douglas Slocombe, British Entertainment History Project
What Slocombe brought from Ealing
The Ealing influence on Rollerball is structurally interesting. The comedies had taught Slocombe how to keep a screwball ensemble legible — how to compose a frame so the audience always knows who is doing what, even when six characters are doing six things at once. The Rollerball arena scenes apply that same logic to twenty skaters and three motorcycles. The audience never loses track of which player has the ball, which player is blocking, which motorcyclist is closing on whom. Without that legibility the death-match at MSG would not work as drama; it would only be a blur.
Awards and the Indiana Jones years
Slocombe was BAFTA-nominated five times and won three times — The Servant (1963), The Great Gatsby (1974), Julia (1977). He was Oscar-nominated three times. He retired after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and was appointed OBE in 2008. He died February 22, 2016, in London, at one hundred and three. He had been the oldest living BAFTA-winning cinematographer for years before his death.
Slocombe was the rare cinematographer who could light a sound-stage drawing room and a Pinewood arena in the same career and make both look right. Rollerball is one of the films in which the Ealing comedies, the Losey psychodramas, and the eventual blockbuster work all sit visibly in the same picture. (wikipedia, watershed)