John G Avildsen (1976)
This screening of Rocky, which brought BFI’s month-long ‘The Cinematic Life of Boxing’ programme to a close, was introduced by the season’s curator, Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka. He hailed the film as a boxing classic, the inspiration for generations of aspiring young fighters, and so on, but made no mention of what made Rocky, fifty years old this year, interesting in the first place. He trotted out the picture’s Academy Award stats (ten nominations, three wins), without linking Rocky’s underdog success – with critics and audiences, as well as at the Oscars – to its storyline and gestation. Rocky Balboa is a very small-time boxer, chosen by the charismatic, undefeated world heavyweight champion to be his next title-bout opponent. The screenplay’s author was Sylvester Stallone, whose only previous writing credit was additional dialogue for The Lords of Flatbush (1974). In his late twenties at the time, Stallone had already played several bit parts in films and TV but rarely received acting credits (The Lords of Flatbush, his biggest role to date, was an exception). Even so, his condition for selling the Rocky script, which he claimed to have written in four days, was playing the title role. United Artists may have worried that was a financial risk; on the other hand, Stallone wouldn’t himself cost much. Rocky was made for less than $1m. It became the highest-grossing picture of its year.
When I first saw John G Avildsen’s film, in early 1977, I thought it was OK and recall being relieved when Rocky won the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Although it didn’t deserve them (this was the year of Taxi Driver, though Scorsese himself wasn’t even nominated!), better they went to Rocky than to Network, as I’d feared they would. (Rocky also won for film editing.) I’d never returned to Rocky until now and had no interest in seeing the franchise that it spawned – Rocky II to Rocky V inclusive (1979-1982-1985-1990) plus Rocky Balboa (2006) – which sees the protagonist lose his no-hoper USP and win world title fights ad nauseam. (I did see the first Creed (2015).) The irony of Rocky‘s progress from humble origins to box-office juggernaut is remarkable but not enough to waste time watching Rocky pictures. To try now to see the original for what it once was, you need to break through the dual barrier of its commercial afterlife (each one of the five sequels made a healthy profit) and the kind of movie star that Sylvester Stallone became, through the Rambo as well as the Rocky franchise.
Stallone was inspired to write Rocky by watching the March 1975 world title fight between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner – Ali’s first defence after winning back the title in the previous October’s ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ with George Foreman. As an underdog, Wepner was hardly in the Rocky Balboa class: he’d struggled up the heavyweight rankings to number eight in the world. Even so, Stallone was clearly taken with his gallant determination to take Ali to the distance – a determination thwarted in the last minute of the fifteenth and final round, when the referee stopped the fight to spare Wepner further punishment. Stallone clearly had other influences, too, from sporting history and movie history. His hero’s hero is a real-life sporting namesake – a photo of Rocky Marciano has pride of place on Rocky Balboa’s apartment wall. In Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy, once a promising boxer, famously laments that he ‘coulda been a contender’. Terry blames his elder brother, right-hand man to the mobster who controls organised labour on the New York docks, that he ‘ended up with a one-way ticket to Palookaville’: before he gets his big chance, Rocky Balboa supplements his meagre boxing income working as a debt collector for a Mafia loan shark. And Rocky’s title character is also in part the man who created him. Italian American Rocky’s nickname in the ring is the ‘Italian Stallion’, which translates as ‘stallone italiano’.
Rocky takes place in Philadelphia, birthplace of American democracy, where world heavyweight champ Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) is scheduled to defend his crown on New Year’s Day 1976, to mark the start of the US Bicentennial. Rocky’s chance comes when Creed’s planned opponent drops out with an injury just five weeks before the fight date. Until Creed chooses him to step in, Rocky seems to be going nowhere personally as well as professionally. He lives alone, except for his two pet turtles, in a tenement building. He reluctantly renews training with Mickey Goldmill (Burgess Meredith), a retired bantamweight pro, who now runs a local gym and despises Rocky for having, as Mickey sees it, wasted his boxing potential. When promoter George Jergens (Thayer David) offers him the fight with Creed, Rocky is again reluctant to accept – even for a life-changing fee of $150,000 – but eventually agrees. His unorthodox intensive training for the Creed fight will include using sides of beef as punchbags, at the workplace of his meatpacker friend, Paulie Pannino (Burt Young). Lonely, irascible Paulie shares an apartment with his sister Adrian (Talia Shire), a shy spinster who works in the pet shop where Rocky got the turtles. Rocky’s tentative courtship of Adrian means his life has already started to change when Creed changes it more dramatically.
Rocky has plenty of virtues. John G Avildsen’s succinct description of the journeyman boxing world gets things off to a good start. We get a clear impression of the level of competition involved. After putting an opponent on the deck, Rocky kneels and carries on hitting the man to ensure he doesn’t get up. In the dressing room afterwards, the club manager gives victor and vanquished their cash – Rocky wins forty dollars minus deductions for locker and cornerman, shower and towel. I liked it that his committed training for the big fight seems fired by a desperate need to avoid humiliation rather than a belief that he has a chance of beating Creed. Near the start and the end of his training, Rocky ascends the seventy-six steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s East Entrance. The Rocky Steps, as they soon became known, are a tourist attraction thanks to these celebrated sequences. The before-and-after contrast is pat – Rocky at first struggles up, later sprints up the steps – but none the less effective for that, and Bill Conti’s accompanying music is terrific. Rocky isn’t much to look at, but that’s doubly helpful. The scuzzy visuals reinforce the main characters’ downmarket world, and Rocky’s hard training slog in a wintry cityscape. James Crabe’s rough-and-ready camerawork probably also helped Avildsen’s film seem more genuine – artlessness as a badge of sincerity. At this distance in time, the original Apollo Creed is an imaginative, maybe even a daring creation. His charisma, sharp tongue and high opinion of himself are obviously based on Muhammad Ali, but Creed is no kind of cultural or religious activist: he’s just a shrewd commercial operator. George Jergens praises Creed’s idea of giving ‘a local boy a shot at the world title on this country’s biggest birthday’ as ‘very American’. Creed corrects him: no, ‘it’s very smart’. At the fight itself, the Black champion enters dressed and bewigged as George Washington, then turns into Uncle Sam, complete with Stars-and-Stripes boxing trunks.
It’s a shame that Rocky‘s clever, funny premise is finally sacrificed on the altar of emotional uplift. The champion assumes, of course, that his defence against Rocky Balboa will be over in no time: none of his previous opponents has ever gone the distance with Creed. It’s fine that Rocky succeeds where all others failed – his doing so picks up on the masochism that seems to be an essential part of boxing’s appeal. But the fight itself, for all that it’s certainly climactic, is daft. It’s one thing for Creed’s arrogance to be punished, as it must be punished, immediately, as Rocky puts him on the canvas during round one[1]. It’s a different matter for the contest to be an all-stops-out slugfest from start to finish. A fifteen-round heavyweight bout just doesn’t work that way. I’m not surprised that I misremembered the fight’s outcome. I had the idea that it was a draw, with Creed therefore remaining champion because the challenger hadn’t beaten him. In fact, Rocky loses a split decision – the announcement nearly drowned out in the noisy mayhem of the closing scene. We’re meant to see the actual result as unimportant, not so much because Rocky has put up a great fight but because he takes this opportunity to declare triumphantly his love for Adrian, who joins him in the ring.
Romantic priority at the end of Rocky might be easier to accept if the couple’s relationship hadn’t seemed a makeweight in what’s gone before. Still, Sylvester Stallone and Talia Shire are an appealing partnership. Early on, this romance is like a caveman courting a mouse, and Shire (nearly unrecognisable from her Godfather character) rather overdoes the shrinking violet. She’s more comfortable, despite her role being underwritten, once Rocky removes Adrian’s spectacles and gets her to take off the woolly hat that kept her hair hidden. Although he’s a shallow actor, Stallone makes plenty of his lines tender and funny. He’s very effective as Rocky-in-training, no doubt because he really was doing the hard yards of getting in shape. Burt Young was another jobbing actor, making the most of his opportunity here. Burgess Meredith, who’d enjoyed a deservedly long and successful career on screen and stage, is probably miscast as Mickey: he works very hard at pugnacious rancour. Carl Weathers is amusing as Apollo Creed. All four co-stars stayed with Stallone for most of Rocky’s journey, but John G Avildsen took a break from II, III and IV (all directed by Stallone himself). Through much of the 1980s, Avildsen was looking after The Karate Kid, The Karate Kid Part II and The Karate Kid Part III but he returned for Rocky V in 1990. That was also the year that Talia Shire appeared as Connie Corleone for the last time, in The Godfather: Part III. Although Coppola’s trilogy is few people’s idea of a movie franchise, those Roman numerals put it in striking movie-history company.
30 April 2026
[1] Chuck Wepner did knock Muhammad Ali down, though in the ninth round and Ali got straight up again. It seems there’s video evidence to support Ali’s claim that Wepner stood on his foot to make the knockdown happen.
