The Bicentennial was a challenging time for the United States. The 200th birthday of the world’s most powerful nation reminded its citizens of past glory and made inevitable comparisons with a bleak present, marked by the aftermath of bloody military fiascos, political scandals, economic and environmental woes. Many began to fear that the future would be even darker. Any film that could convincingly portray a different vision and give hope to Americans was bound to become a spectacular success. Such a film was Rocky, the best-known and most successful sports film of all time.
The title protagonist, played by Sylvester Stallone, is Rocky Balboa, a 30-year-old professional boxer from Philadelphia. With his best days apparently behind him and even his trainer Mickey (played by Burgess Meredith) giving up on him, he makes a living fighting boxers who are, like him, unknown and winning humiliatingly low prizes. To make ends meet, he is forced to work as a debt collector for local gangster Gazzo (played by Joe Spinell), but even that career is not very successful because Rocky happens to be a kind-hearted man. This, on the other hand, serves Rocky very well when his best friend Paulie (played by Burt Young) arranges a date with his sister Adrian (played by Talia Shire), a plain-looking and shy pet shop clerk who gradually begins to like the huge man, who compensates for his lack of education and finesse with persistence and a good heart. Rocky’s life unexpectedly changes when Apollo Creed (played by Carl Weathers), the flamboyant heavyweight boxing champion of the world, decides to celebrate the Bicentennial by staging a match in Philadelphia between himself and a completely unknown boxer to show that anyone in America has a chance. Rocky is picked as the challenger and, unlike Creed, who sees this as nothing more than a promotional stunt, takes the match seriously and begins to prepare.
Stallone wrote the script for Rocky, partially inspired by the 1975 fight between legendary boxing champion Muhammad Ali (who served as a model for Creed) and unknown contender Chuck Wepner. But the real inspiration for Stallone came from his Hollywood career, which, just like Rocky’s, was going nowhere at the time. Faced with numerous rejections and almost penniless, he managed to persuade producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff to buy his script and allow him to star in its production. Just as in the film, the underdog defeated its much bigger and more prestigious opponents at the box office, becoming one of the greatest hits of its time and even managing to snatch an Oscar from the likes of Network and Taxi Driver. The success of Rocky continued with a film series that lasts to this day, and the word “Rocky” entered many vocabularies as a synonym for an underdog who triumphs against overwhelming odds.
Some critics and film scholars dislike Rocky for the simple reason that it deprived more deserving New Hollywood classics of the prestigious Oscars and often try to explain this by comparing the “fairytale feel-good fantasy” of Stallone’s film with the raw and uncompromising realism of Lumet’s and Scorsese’s films. Such claims are unfounded because Rocky, at least for the most part, looks very much like an ambitious New Hollywood film. Director John G. Avildsen doesn’t shy away from portraying the decline of 1970s America through dirty, graffiti-marked streets with bored, impoverished youth who have nothing to do except hang on street corners. Avildsen’s pace is deliberately slow, perhaps too slow for today’s audience, but it allows us to become well-acquainted with the title character, his fears, dreams, and desires, and actually to root for him in the fight scene at the end. This approach allows the audience to see Stallone as a surprisingly serious and quite talented dramatic actor. His performance was such that even some critics compared him with the legendary Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, something hard to imagine in other Rocky sequels and the less demanding action film roles that would comprise much of Stallone’s later career. Stallone was helped by the extremely talented Talia Shire, who convincingly portrays a rather unglamorous character, creates great chemistry with Stallone, and even transcends some of the melodramatic sentimentality at the end. Not all the cast was good – Burt Young could be slightly irritating at times, and Burgess Meredith occasionally went over the top. Carl Weathers as Rocky’s opponent was actually the least memorable character, and the fight scene and whole boxing-match subplot at times seemed like a distraction compared with the more intimate story about Rocky and Adrian. The fight in the end nevertheless delivered the goods for fans of boxing action. Rocky as a whole served its purpose well – by providing inspiration to anxious Americans in the 1970s, by making Stallone into a Hollywood superstar, and finally, by showing audiences that sometimes fairytales can become real life.
RATING: 7/10 (++)
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