Rollover (1981)

I know from looking at it just exactly what the studio is hoping you’ll get from Rollover.  They know you’ll want to see Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson screw over the greedy companies that are trying to take over the major interest in Fonda’s company.  And they know you’ll want to see Fonda and Kristofferson screw each other.  The latter takes over but I’m afraid that this movie is about as sexy as a rusty nail.

Fonda plays Lee Winters, the window of Charlie Winters the Chairman and major stockholder of WinterChem Enterprises, a chemical company that has been trying to obtain the financing in order to buy a processing plant located in Spain.  Also, while trying to make the purchase, Lee is investigating the reasons why her husband was murdered.  Not to give too much away (not that you’d care) but he stumbled upon the account number that reveals evidence of a massive fraud scheme that could cause economic collapse in the United States.  Into this potboiler comes Hubbel Smith (Kristofferson), a financier who is made President of Borough National Bank in an effort to look into it’s financial situation.

See if you can follow this: WinterChem is one of the Borough National Bank’s most lucrative customers not because they can make the loan but because they could broker a deal between WinterChem and some other lender capable of loaning the money that WinterChem needs to by the plant in Spain to which the bank could profit with a 1% finder’s fee.  The bank, at one point, is waiting for some Arab oil money deposits to be renewed in a rollover.  If it fails, the bank would then be unable to refund the deposits but thankfully at the last minute the rollover happens save for some money that has been diverted into the account containing the same account number as the one revealed in the fraud scheme and to which several people have been murdered, including Charlie Winters.

Meanwhile, things get complicated when Hubbell takes this opportunity to get more lucrative with the Widow Winters.  He becomes financially and physically interested in this woman and the sheer boredom overhanging the financial plot is melded into a lot of scenes of Lee and Hubbell talking to each other in sexy, passionate voices.  See, in the middle of a potential financial collapse, they want to have sex.  Too bad the actors don’t have any chemistry.  Fonda seems onboard here, but Kristofferson’s performance is just awful.  He’s not sexy, he’s creepy.

I didn’t care about this plot.  I didn’t care about these people and I didn’t care about the Arab scheme.  Apparently the movie is suppose to scare me with the threat that the Arabs will destroy the American economic infrastructure, but the plot is so overcomplicated (see above) that I wasn’t thrilled, I was confused.