Stallone's Rocky remains a gritty contender 50 years on

A new film by Peter Farrelly titled I Play Rocky examines the underdog story of how a major boxing movie was produced against the odds, featuring an untried young screenwriter who was permitted to take the lead role. To mark its 50th anniversary, the 1976 film Rocky is being reissued. It is a forthright, rousingly idealistic picture that possesses a wholesome patriotism and avoids the traditional, gloomy baggage of tragedy, cynicism, and loss often found in boxing films. Additionally, the movie acts as a love letter to Philadelphia, which is known as the cradle of American democracy.

The film's writer and insurgent star, Sylvester Stallone, created the character of Rocky Balboa, a punchy heavyweight fighter who has just turned 30. Rocky makes peanuts while slugging it out with bums and is reduced to collecting debts for the Philly mob, an indignity that infuriates his grizzled old trainer and former mentor Mickey, played by Burgess Meredith, who once saw greatness in Rocky and is disgusted to see him selling out. Rocky is also entirely oblivious to the national preparations for the 1976 bicentennial, with boxing serving as the anniversary's theme in a manner similar to country music in Robert Altman’s Nashville, though without the pessimism.

The protagonist is poignantly in love with Adrianna, or Adrian, played by Talia Shire, an almost cartoonishly nerdy woman who works behind the counter at a pet shop. She lives with her shlubby, protective brother Paulie, a meat packer who hates his job and his life. Paulie, who is seen in a photo at their home as a younger, slimmer man in a Navy uniform, is always trying to set Rocky up with his sister.

He hopes for a brother-in-law relationship with the tough guy so that he might work for Rocky’s wiseguy employer, Gazzo, played by Joe Spinell. Stallone shows how intensely irritated he is by Paulie’s naive demands, not only because of Paulie’s manifest lack of qualifications for the violent job, but because he hates that he is having to do it himself.

After establishing this situation, screenwriter Stallone introduces his second act with an exhilarating flourish. World champion Apollo Creed, played by Carl Weathers, arrives in town to defend his heavyweight title, but he and his retinue are appalled when the scheduled challenger pulls out due to an injury. Creed decides to turn his fight into a story of the American dream-come-true, choosing to fight a local Philly boxer and picking Rocky because he likes his nickname, the “Italian Stallion”.

He and his crew assume this will be an amusing pastime where he will charitably give a local no-hoper a moment in the ring before putting him on the canvas. However, the tough, canny, and big-hearted Rocky has other ideas, waking up at four every morning for roadwork and determining to make it despite being too puffed to get up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art at first.

As Rocky, Stallone is clearly a very big, strong man and is very convincing in the ring, although he lacks the razor-sharp defined musculature that would be considered indispensable today. There is no “weigh in” scene involving him and Apollo. In many ways, the film is about hero-worship of the great heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, whose image is repeatedly invoked, and also about an Italian-American’s gallant, non-bigoted rearguard action against the inexorable dominance of African-American fighters, with real-life champion Joe Frazier making a walk-on appearance.

Rocky thoughtfully tells Adrian how tough boxing is, how loaded it is against fighters like him, and how it is almost designed to turn boxers into wrecks. When a movie audience hears that Rocky has been promised $150,000 as his share of the purse, they must wince with anticipation at the betrayal that is surely coming, wondering if he will be cheated of that fortune. Similarly, when the loathsome Gazzo gives Rocky $500 for training expenses, we wince again, knowing Rocky is now in debt to this gangster and wondering if Gazzo will demand a quid quo pro or ask Rocky to take a dive.

The answer in both cases, by a kind of miracle, is no. Rocky is a film that appears to remember the melancholy destiny of Brando in On the Waterfront and the ugly racial contest in The Great White Hope, which starred James Earl Jones as the Jim Crow-era black boxer Jack Johnson, but it turns despair on its head. Stallone’s film was produced by Hollywood titans Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, who four years later were behind Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, a boxing movie that restored the darkness and agony to the genre in monochrome.

Nevertheless, similarities remain, such as Adrian’s first, extended, uncomfortable visit to Rocky’s room, which is not unlike Vickie LaMotta first coming to Jake’s house, and the notion of the boxer just wanting to stay upright, absorb the punches and go the distance.