Track with a Brass Ring

By JAY COCKS

It seems at first far too facile and fragile an idea for a full-length movie: the roller derby as a metaphor for America's competition, violence, degradation. Scenes of derby competition worked well in films like Petulia and Medium Cool because they were used as secondary symbols, episodes that were part of a more complex whole. But an entire feature devoted to the derby, its stars and its lifestyles? Director-Cameraman Robert Kaylor confounds all expectations in Derby. He does it by treating the competition not as a symbol but as a sorry fact of life.

His film is about one real skater who has made it big (Charlie O'Connell. captain of the San Francisco Bay Bombers), and another who wants desperately to follow him around the same successful turn. Mike Snell works in the Firestone Tire plant in Dayton, Ohio, and dreams of making it in big-time derby competition. Kaylor intercuts footage of O'Connell and Snell: the derby hero bashing his rivals, leading his team, conducting a tour of a moneyed man's San Francisco, and Hero Worshiper Snell going through the day-today hassles of making a tentative kind of life for himself and his family. Kaylor captures scenes and feelings--fac-tores, roadhouses, dancehalls, motorcycles--that make similar attempts in Joe look like musty melodrama.

Kaylor uses a kind of modified neorealist technique in which real people re-enact real situations. The results are often stunning. There is a pervasive tone of desperation in Derby, a sense of ironic, backhanded success about O'Connell and a pitiful aimlessness in Snell. As the documentary ends, he gets on a motorcycle and rides out to roller derby school in San Francisco. Snell says he wants to "better" himself, but Derby has made it clear that success will mean no more than living a hollow dream. Jay Cocks

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