“An alien vision of an alien world”: Rocky reviewed in 1977

In the final sequence of Rocky, brilliantly scripted up to that point, Sylvester Stallone has rather backed himself into a corner: whatever way he decides to have the big fight come out, he is likely to be taken to task for being too upbeat, too downbeat, or too middle-of-the-road. In the event he chooses upbeat, with Rocky proving to himself “for the first time in my life I’m not just another bum from the neighbourhood”, and his girl happily joining him in the ring so that they can say “I love you” to each other, also for the first time. A pleasantly heartwarming moment, despite (or even because of) Rocky’s plaintive cry of “Ain’t gonna be no rematch! Don’t want one!” heard distantly floating up out of the ring, which has prompted producer Irwin Winkler to proclaim that Rocky “is in the tradition of the classic Frank Capra films”. 

In fact it is an altogether different proposition. Rocky may have won $150,000 in his heroic fight, but no fairy Capra godmother waves her magic wand over his character and his future: he was a bum before the fight, and one may be sure (Stallone’s own performance is superbly uncompromising on Rocky’s hopeless, dimwitted inability to conform to any required standards) that he will remain a bum. 

On the other hand, the thought that the film proposes for us is that even a bum is human, enjoys intimations of perfection, and is maybe only a bum relatively speaking. Put into so many words, it sounds impossibly naive; yet this is what, totally unsentimentally and totally unpatronisingly, the film is about. We are in effect invited to view the world through Rocky’s mind; and we look, at his slum midden with its peeling walls and stinking garbage and the toughs hanging round every corner, and we see that it is good. 

Firstly there is the metamorphosing medium of Stallone’s quite amazing dialogue, most of it delivered by himself in a non-stop stream of semi-articulate gibberish that gradually begins to communicate his own very personal grasp of essentials. Having done all he can to force his sister into Rocky’s arms, for instance, Adrian’s drunken slob of a brother puzzledly asks Rocky what he sees in her anyway; “Gaps”, Rocky answers after a pause for serious thought, then embroiders an explanation that is way over his listener’s head: “She got gaps, I got gaps. Together we fill gaps”. 

Second, there is the way Avildsen and cameraman James Crabe turn the Philadelphian exteriors into something very close to a series of Magritte paintings: extraordinary nocturnal landscapes of strangely dislocated urban geometry (the elevated railway and bridges cutting through at all levels, the weirdly box-like structure of the alley of houses down which Rocky sets off for an early morning jog) in which the human figures seem both estranged and yet as much a natural part of the scene as the tenuously impermanent structures themselves. Truly this is an alien vision of an alien world in which one begins to discover the other face of dereliction: Rocky casually scooping a drunk out of the gutter and cheerfuly dumping him down beside another in a bar (“Here’s a friend for you”); youths on a street corner totally absorbed by their painstaking (and rather pleasing) creation of a hit tune; loan-shark Gazzo coming on like Mack the Knife but turning out to be a benevolent uncle, as full of surprises as all the other animals in this private zoo of Rocky’s. 

If the film occasionally fringes danger (notably in the Marty-ish relationship between Rocky and his jolie laide), it is invariably hauled back to safety by the brilliant performances all down the cast list, by Avildsen’s tactful direction (cf. his pull back into long shot for the emotional climax of the scene where Rocky grudgingly relents and lets Mickey become his manager), and above all by Stallone’s dialogue. At one point, ordered by Adrian’s brother to persist in asking for a date after she has locked herself into her room in a tizzy of confusion, Rocky knocks hesitantly, then solemnly begins: “It’s me, Rocky, you know, Rocky… I don’t know what to say ‘cos I ain’t talked to a door before”. Throughout the film, to both moving and brilliantly funny effect, the feeling is of this door gradually opening to release the lyric poet struggling out from under the loquacious Rocky’s dim but infinitely expressive grasp of language.