Roller Boogie (1979)

Director: Mark L. Lester
Writer: Barry Schneider, based on a story by Irwin Yablans
Stars: Linda Blair and Jim Bray

Index: Make It a Double.

OK, this was ripe for a fresh look. I’ve seen it before and I reviewed it back in 2008, finding a lot of bad and very little good. However, Linda Blair chose it for her double very deliberately. After the impactful Born Innocent, one of many such films she made in the seventies, she saw this one as pure unadulterated fun.

And she isn’t wrong. Sure, this has less of an actual story and more of a collision of tropes with a cliché barging in halfway through just because it can. Sure, there’s a reliance on plot convenience that boggles the mind. Sure, her co-star wasn’t even an actor, Jim Bray clearly hired because he was a champion skater. But, like Rock ’n’ Roll High School, another 1979 film I needed to see in a fresh light to appreciate, it ultimately counts as a seventies beach movie. There’s a pride in fun and goofiness.

The initial tropes are rebellious rich girl and rich girl meets poor boy, before we get to save the hangout. In both instances, the rich girl is Terry Barkley, Blair’s character. She lives in a Beverly Hills mansion that I’d buy for a dollar; Terry’s posh roadster sits next to his and hers Rolls Royces. However, her parents are so lost in their own lives that they love her without giving her attention, hence her rebellion. That said, I did adore Beverly Garland’s role as her clueless but ultimately supportive mother.

So, like apparently everybody else in town, she straps on roller skates and heads down to the boardwalk and the local rink. We’re taught in the opening scene that the most important thing in life is joining any line of passing roller skaters. Forget your phone call (payphone, of course) and quit making out. Join the line!

To be fair, the first unmistakable positive is here, because it’s a character called “Complete Control” Conway. He gets no lines, though he eventually plays a crucial part in proceedings, but stunt skater Rick Sciaccia is memorable for being incredibly good at being incredibly bad. His character name is ironic, of course, but he keeps his wild flailing around impeccably safe, even if it doesn’t remotely look like it.

Also on the boardwalk is Bobby James, who supposedly works at a skate shop there, even if we only see him in it once. He talks up how dedicated he is to making the Olympics (note: there was no Olympic roller skating until 1992, when rink hockey was a demo sport; the only official inclusion now is speed skating), and he is presumably paid to be in the store, but he’s quickly talked out to dance on the boardwalk and spends the rest of the picture caught up in its wider shenanigans.

For half the film, that’s pursuing Terry. At the rink, Conway’s about to knock her over so he sweeps her to safety and she ends up in his lap. He won’t let go. “I’m fine, thank you,” she tells him. “You sure are,” he replies.

She skates with him briefly and hires him to teach her her to dance on skates, which is fair. Because of the way the movie is shot, it’s clear that Blair was skating for real and she spends more time with skates on than not. Only a few long distance shots during Terry and Bobby’s routine in the roller boogie tournament seem to have used a professional skater as a double. It seems to me that she was a capable skater, if one who knew her limits and so didn’t attempt any of the outrageously flash stuff that we see from Bobby and a succession of characters in a succession of rink skating scenes backed by a succession of disco songs.

So half the movie is Terry pouting about her parents but coming alive when she straps on her skates and Bobby ecstatic she’s still talking to him. No, that doesn’t amount to a heck of a lot of story but that really isn’t the point. The point is to give us so many skating scenes and so much disco music that we start to think we were teleported into a roller rink.

Oh, and the amount of skin on show is vast, so this is quite the gift for the voyeur, which is stuck in our minds after we first meet Franklin Potter. He’s a family friend Terry’s parents are eager to see her end up with, but she describes him accurate as “a lecherous jackass”.

We meet him at a recital, where everyone is listening to Terry’s flute except him, because he’s glued to her thighs. She’s uncomfortable with his attention, as she is with what follows. However we meet her changing from a skimpy nightie into a skimpier skating outfit, a leotard and short shorts. She’s fine with those.

Then again, this is where Blair affirmed her adulthood by framing herself as a sex symbol, even though her best friend Lana is Kimberly Beck, a much more traditional screen beauty.

I should add that adulthood is a theme here, one that ends up being more substantial than the actual story that doesn’t even show up for half the film. Just in case you care, that’s about a ruthless businessman planning to tear down the rink to build a shopping mall, but it really doesn’t matter, other than giving a villainous role to Mark Goddard, best known as Maj. Don West in Lost in Space.

What matters is that Linda Blair was playing a child on the cusp of womanhood who missed out on a childhood, not that far from her own reality, just because of music not drama. After a string of performances as a child actor doing traditionally adult things, she was finally able at twenty to do that as an adult. She’s the most grounded member of the clique she ends up in by far and she gets the best serious scenes, not that there are many. However, she also gets to be an adult playing a child, even if it’s likely to be for the last time, and she clearly enjoyed it.

What that means that there’s more depth to her role than there is in the broader story. I still struggled with this from that standpoint. It’s a stupid movie, every bit as stupid as Bikini Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo or whichever beach movie you prefer, but without any of the guest appearances, the wacky supporting characters (except maybe Phones and Conway) or indeed a live band, the music here played on cassette or vinyl at the rink for the characters or right out of thin air for us as a soundtrack.

What I got from those scenes is the cool old tech but then this wasn’t my era and that’s an important note to make. This is a movie of its time, emphatically so, and I’m a decade behind that time, as well as from a different culture. It seems to me that the best way to appreciate it is to have lived it. If you’re American and were in your late teens in 1979, you’ll get the conga lines, the leotards and Boogie Wonderland. And this may be good old nostalgic fun. Linda Blair certainly thinks so and she smiles a heck of a lot throughout it.