sol ***SPOILERS*** Corporate crime and manipulation of stocks bonds and currencies is the shocking story of the movie "Rollover" that's much more like what's happening today in 2010 that back in 1981 when the film as released.In it we have a number of shadowy figures in the US and overseas who are trying to cover their behinds by siphoning off the cash accounts of the financially strapped Borough Savings Bank in order to convert their ill gotten gains into billions in gold bullion. It's when the banks CEO Charlie Winter, Garrison Lane, was found murdered in his office in the World Trade Center that it became very apparent that his murder had something to do with the banks cash flow troubles! That in the fact that Charlie uncovered in an account, #21214, that was secretly funneling millions of dollars out of it every month!With the late Charlie Winters' wife Lee, Jane Fonda, becoming the banks new president she tries to save it from going under by brokering a half billion deal a deal for a petrochemical plant in Spain with the bank getting a 1% finders fee on it. That's just enough to pay off its shareholders next dividend in order to keep it was going bankrupt. As all this is happening 1st New York Bank President Maxwell Emery, Hume Cronyn, who's a silent partner in the distressed Borough Savings Bank hires financial whiz kid Hub Smih, played by a super clean shaven Kris Kristofferson, to get to the bottom of the Borough Bank's problems. That's before the final bell, on Wall Street, rings and it collapses like a house of cards!***SPOILERS*** What Smith soon discovers is that it's non other then the man who hired him Maxwell Emery himself who's behind Borough Savings Bank's impending collapses. In Emery using account #21214 to secretly shift the banks money into it he's been bleeding the bank white and at the same timer waiting for the right moment for him as his Saudi Arabian banking partners to pull out all the money in that bank as well as some 1,200 to 1,500 other banks all across the US and Europe! That would end up making the dollar as well as any other national paper currency as worthless as the paper its printed on! As for Lee Winters, who had discovered the truth about her husbands murder, her trying to blackmail Emery and his Saudi partners in crime in having them agree on a sweetheart deal with her, to keep Lee and the Borough Bank from going bankrupt, has them put her on the hit list, like her late husband Charlie, for immediate termination!A bit over the top at the time of its release "Rollover" is in fact a forerunner to movies like "Wall Street" in how those who control power ruthlessly use it to keep them in control. Smith is soon confronted with the truth, a possible collapse of world currencies, and is together with Lee Winters totally helpless to do anything about it.***MORE SPOILERS*** As the Saudis go into panic mode in being caught with their pants down start to pull their money out of US and European banks the entire world economy goes straight to hell together with them and the person they put their trust in to keep their grandiose plan secret Maxwell Emery! As for Hub Smith and Lee Winters they like everyone else will have to start from ground zero in getting back on their feet financially after all the dust, in food monetary riots and runs on banks,clears!

BombVark An over valued dollar, the system on the brink, the big bankers and their government stooges have gone too far. Sound familiar? The previous poster attributes the financial melt down in the movie to capitalism. Actually, the movie doesn't touched at all on the causes of the system breakdown. But it is not capitalism, but government interference in the market which would cause such a melt down. But it is fun to see central banking get its just reward, and to see gold emerge a winner.

tnt videovisions Possibly attempting to do for the world of finance what she'd done to nuclear power in "The China Syndrome"(1979), this Jane Fonda melodrama is a poor investment for any serious movie fan.The story is very hard to follow and poorly constructed with shallow characters. The story is not terribly easy to grasp for the average person in my opinion and not presented to the audience clearly enough-nor well enough to garner much interest and/or curiosity. Fonda appears bored, while still trying to appear smart and glamorous, in her role. Kris Kristofferson is simply a case of very bad casting. Despite some efforts to make him physically appear like a big-time banker, he comes off flat and stiff in his role. Whether talking down a bank president or talking Fonda into bed, all his lines are delivered in a blank monotone style that conveys nothing. We also are never given much background or motivation for the events and doings of the people wandering about this epic of high finance. Fonda and Kristofferson's first meeting isn't much of an icebreaker, yet the two are bedding down together by their second or third encounter.The film is directed by Alan J. Pakula and it looks much like other works for him. Secret meetings in parking lots and suspect late night boardroom conferences may appear to be the things that make up a good thriller, but here they are simply padding between the great nothingness that amounts to two-hours of dull slow paced cliche filled dialog from weak characters that you never grow to care much about. The movie's heavy-handed and overly-dramatic musical score makes many scenes nearly laughable.There's little to recommended beyond those morbidly curious to see a bad movie, which is why I obtained a copy of it. On that level, it does pay a modest dividend.

Sodie Maltin's summary of the film is idiotic. Clearly a case of 'saw the film, didn't understand it, decided to bash it.' That's his loss. Anyone who's ever read 'Das Kapital,' Marx's massive 3-volume (he died before completing the last volume, but it still got up to be around 1,000 pages) masterpiece would immediately recognize in 'Rollover' Marx's assertion that the capitalist system is doomed to self-destruct. That by its very nature it will bring about that thing which it despises most--the world socialist revolution. Marx said that we will see capitalism's boom-then-bust cycle grow increasingly more impossible to control, until it hits a 'low' so deep, so wide-reaching, that workers everywhere will unite and say, 'HEY! This isn't right.' The Great Depression is an example of one such 'deep low' in capitalism's cycle. 'Rollover' is a vision of the next such deep pit. Of how it comes about, in any case. Don't read the next bit if you don't want a spoiler, but the last scenes in the film are of the world proletariat rallying in public places, defying state authority...gearing up to rebel, in other words. That's about as Marxist as you can get! And you don't have to be a dork like me and read 'Das Kapital' to understand it. Maltin...didn't put the thought-effort into this one. And that's a shame, because I think it's a film that's very germane to American life. We think we have it good, and we'll always have it good, because this is the US of A. We have the FDIC now, we'll be all right. That's nonsense!! Maltin called 'Rollover' "financial science fiction." However imprecise that clumsy label might seem, there's a grain of truth to it. For what is sci fi but 'the thing that might someday be?'