The credit crunch might be getting you down, but for a bargain price you can check out an eerily prophetic film about financial crisis, as Kim explores.

A Wall Street panic causes a run on American banks, triggering the collapse of the dollar and other international currencies, a complete loss of confidence in financial institutions and a global economic crisis. No, not this week's (or, more scarily, next week's) headlines, but the climax of director Alan J. Pakula's 1981 movie Rollover, which Leonard Maltin quite properly labels 'one of the few examples of financial science fiction'. It's a tiny sub-genre -- more or less owned in literature by economist Paul Erdman, whose 1976 novel The Crash of '79 has a fairly similar premise -- but current events suggest we should have been paying more attention to it than worrying about the Earth being hit by a meteor or the Antichrist being elected to high office.


The frustrating thing about Rollover is that it now seems too timid. Most of the running time concerns a low-wattage romance between maverick banker Hubbell Smith (Kris Kristofferson) and movie-star-turned-oil-company-chairwoman Lee Winters (Jane Fonda) with a mystery angle kicked off when a sinister hit man kills Lee's businessman husband because he has found out about the dreaded 'account 21214'.

It certainly isn't the best of Pakula's run of gloomy, they're-out-to-get-you conspiracy paranoia movies -- which include the Fonda-starring Klute, the Warren Beatty assassination picture The Parallax View and the true-life All the President's Men. A typical Pakula moment has Lee, unnerved by the thought that she can't trust anyone, ordering her maid 'Nettie, first thing tomorrow, change all the locks in the house' -- of course, 'they' come for her that evening, though it's the good guy who slips into her home rather than the hired killer.


Fonda clearly inhabits a tailor-made role and is coolly stunning in a succession of understated frocks, while a beardless Kristofferson is cast against his cowboy type as a financial hotshot who looks as good as Fonda when posing hands-on-hips in conservative suits that have dated a lot better than the fashionable outfits Richard Gere wears in the contemporary American Gigolo.

It's clear from the outset that Pakula is less interested in mystery (even the widow scarcely expresses concern about her husband's murder and any police investigation fails to intersect with the plot) than the edgy, creepy, science fiction-seeming scenes of currency trading in a cavernous Manhattan office. The printers and screens may be obsolete, but contemporary audiences probably have more understanding of what's going on in these scenes than the few who saw the film on its initial release (it wasn't a hit).