Cinema: Track with a Brass Ring

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...

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