Best Picture: #49
Original Release Date: December 3, 1976
Rating: PG
Runtime: 2 hours
Director: John G. Avildsen
Quick Impressions:
How did Rocky sneak in with the other 1970s best picture winners? They’re all about the Mafia, and narcotics detectives, and mental patients, and people going through a painful divorce, and Vietnam vets, and murdered grifters, and Woody Allen. We haven’t finished watching Kramer Vs. Kramer yet (which made it pretty hard to fly to Los Angeles and leave my five-year-old son behind let me tell you!), but none of the rest of these 70s Best Picture winners have happy endings. (Two of them are chapters of The Godfather! I suppose you could argue that The Sting has a happy ending, but that’s only because it abruptly stops. Nothing is really resolved for Hooker, and revenge or no revenge, Luther is still dead!)
Rocky‘s like a mash-up between On the Waterfront, Marty, and a Renaissance painting. (Seriously, can’t you imagine the hungry underdog sitting for El Greco or Botticelli?) Sylvester Stallone came up with a pretty radical concept for the era. What if somebody followed his passions and won by being satisfied with his life?
Even in a metadramatic way, Rocky gives us an unusually happy ending. Sylvester Stallone was down on his luck. He couldn’t afford to feed his dog. Suddenly, he sold the script to Rocky. Not only was he able to keep the pet he loved, but Rocky’s dog late in the film really is Stallone’s actual dog, giving the audience yet another hungry underdog to become invested in emotionally.
Everybody loves a happy ending–except Oscar voters in the 1970s, I guess. Usually films where the hero gets everything he ever wants don’t do too well at the Academy Awards. Thinking back over the 70s Oscar winners, Rocky stands apart as the most feel good of the bunch. I almost thoughtlessly called it the lightest. But that sounds dismissive. For Rocky personally, the stakes in this movie are incredibly high. In a certain sense, it’s his life he’s fighting for.
The Plot:
Rocky Balboa wants to be taken seriously as a fighter, but the guys at the gym where he trains have started to view him as a disappointment at best, a thug who has wasted his potential and settled for working as muscle for criminals. In his heart, Rocky knows he’s better than that. He’s a thoughtful person who sees past the surface. He has feelings for Adrian, his friend Paulie’s sister who works at a local pet shop. He can see that she’s a person who is also undervalued, one who has fine qualities that will complement his own, filling certain gaps in his heart and his life. With someone to believe in him, Rocky hopes to become the kind of champion in whom others can believe. When he gets the opportunity to participate in a highly publicized fight with heavyweight champ Apollo Creed, Rocky is determined to make the most of it. He wants to prove to the world and to himself that he is a person who can go the distance.
The Good:
When I was in elementary school, I had the extremely ignorant, misinformed impression that Sylvester Stallone was a big, dumb lug who made brainless action movies. I guess there were just so many Rockys and so many Rambos, and when boys played games related to those movies, they mainly just ran around the playground pretending to shoot each other or beating each other up. I had never watched any of Stallone’s movies myself, you see.
When I was a teenager, my mother suddenly became aware of my false impression of Stallone. I didn’t know he wrote Rocky (and adapted the screenplay for First Blood). I also didn’t know the original Rocky had won Best Picture. (That happened before I was born. And, don’t be too hard on me, please, because I was in elementary school when I thought all these stupid things about Stallone and his films.)
My mother was a huge fan of First Blood, so I saw that film many times as a teenager. But I never actually saw Rocky until I was an adult. In fact, the first film I saw in the series was (believe it or not) Rocky Balboa. My husband and I were engaged at that point, and unlike me, he had seen all the Rocky movies. Most of the time, I’m the one catching him up on movies. But in this case, he was excitedly telling me about which Rocky was which and who was in what, and meanwhile I was nodding along cluelessly. At one point, he gushed, “Remember Mr. T. was in that one,” and I could honestly say, “I remember Mr. T.” (You don’t forget Mr. T. I pity the fool who forgets Mr. T.)
So yes, I came to the Rocky franchise a bit late. And I didn’t watch the original Rocky until we decided to show it to our older son and our daughter several years ago.
I really liked Rocky when I watched it then, and I liked it even better this time. I like the character. I can relate to all his nervous talking, and it’s hard not to root for an underdog who tries so hard. What I find most interesting about the character is that he’s like a walking lesson not to judge a book by its cover. He’s an enforcer for the mob (or at least a collections agent for a crime boss. That’s not my world, so forgive my imprecise technology). But he’s also kind hearted with a gentle spirit. He loves animals. He respects women (although some of his thoughts on how being a woman works seem misguided at best). He has a sweetness, an earnestness. Over the years, a lot of people have made him feel small. Sometimes when that happens, a person wants retaliation, to lash out at those people or others, to make them feel small. Rocky just wants to be proud of himself. He wants to do something big.
Stallone makes the character so charming. Even when we are not quite sure we can agree with him on something (like that increasingly awkward lecture to Marie), we still like him.
I’ve also always liked Talia Shire. I have no explanation for that because…I’ve already told you I never even saw Rocky until I was an adult. Maybe it’s because Talia Shire is conspicuously the most interesting female character in The Godfather series. (I’ve mentioned that unlike most discerning audiences, I did like Godfather III quite a bit when I watched it with my grandma back when it first came out in my childhood. Connie has a decent part in that one.)
Great, too, is Burgess Meredith as Mickey, Rocky’s initially reluctant trainer. Meredith goes all in on the character so hard that he’s practically a caricature. On paper, that sounds like a bad performance. But in the movie (somewhat inexplicably) it works. You feel like the director must be up in Meredith’s face yelling, “Be big! Bigger! Bigger! More grizzled! Now regret not leaving more of a legacy! Let us see it in your face, hear it in your voice! You know what, just say it! Bigger! More! And whatever you do, don’t forget to mention that you want to be his manager! The audience had better not leave this movie not knowing that you want to be his manager!” He’s great.
As Apollo Creed, Carl Weathers gets bonus points from me just for setting off a chain reaction of Arrested Development jokes in my brain every time he appears on screen. I love his evolving reaction to his hand-picked opponent. Weathers gives a pretty nuanced performance for someone playing a character who so often desires to appear larger than life.
I also love the way the movie looks. That’s something I don’t remember noticing on an initial watch. Cinematography is an unsung strength of this production.
Best Scene:
That iconic training montage set to Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now” is hard to top. I feel like this was the mother of all montages, the music-filled training sequence that gave birth to the entire 1980s, the Ur Montage. Honestly, it’s very pleasurable to watch, and it’s also like watching a mini-movie (sort of like the beginning of Up in that respect). We enjoy watching Rocky’s training journey and seeing the appreciable difference made by all the hard work he puts into that regimen.
Also pretty great is Rocky’s big scene with Burgess Meredith in his apartment. Part of this moment’s charm is that it feels surreal, as if the entire scene could be a figment of either character’s imagination. Both men express what they fear, what they regret, and what they want so clearly. In life, such sentiments often go unsaid. So for viewers, there’s a certain cathartic pleasure in listening to these characters loudly proclaim their insecurities, regrets, and desires over and over again in a (loud) face-to-face conversation.
Best Scene Visually:
Rocky was not even nominated for Best Cinematography, and that breaks my heart a little because it looks gorgeous. I commented on the striking look of several shots as I watched with my daughter. The iconic training montage I just mentioned contains so many visuals that stick with you. (Whether you’ve seen the film or not, you know it does as well as I do.)
There’s also an incredibly striking scene near the beginning of the film when Rocky goes to collect some money for his boss.
Throughout the film, the cinematography stands out to me. I can’t believe it didn’t get an Oscar nomination. But perhaps the cleverest scene visually comes when Rocky does his TV interview in the meat locker. He’s taking the fight deadly seriously, but Apollo Creed isn’t looking.
Later at the fight, Creed enters in quite spectacular fashion. His entrance alone shows that he and Rocky are on a different page. (Finally during this scene, I understood what Creed found so patriotic about New Year’s Day. It’s New Year’s Day, 1976, the bicentennial.)
Best Action Sequence:
I know what you’re thinking. The fight scene at the end has to be best. Of course it is, but how can I talk about it without giving tremendous spoilers? I don’t think it’s a huge spoiler to say that the movie ends about one minute after the fight is over. So describing the fight in any kind of detail would probably give away too much. Of course, the film did come out in 1976. Still, I didn’t see it for the first time until my daughter was in elementary school, and I actually had a false impression of what the ending would be. For some reason, I spent my entire childhood laboring under the misapprehension that Rocky ended one way, when it fact it ends in a totally different way. So I’m not going to spoil the ending. (If you’re squeamish, though, it’s a good idea to look away during that eyelid part. If you don’t know what I mean now, you will when you watch the movie.)
Instead I’d like you to consider a different action sequence, one that I think is just as significant as the fight, Rocky and Adrian’s first date. This entire sequence is hysterically funny but also consistently moving, sometimes heart breaking. Consider how odd this date is. It’s Thanksgiving. For some bizarre reason, Adrian’s brother Paulie (Burt Young) thinks he can motivate her to go out by throwing the turkey she has been cooking all day into the alley. Then Rocky takes her to a skating rink (which is closed), tells the guy working there that she’s very sick, and spends the next ten minutes chasing around the ice after her in his street shoes, talking incessantly as she ice stakes. How many movies deliver that kind of action? (On a related note, I feel like I’ve had a variation of that date, only the guy chasing after me was less charming and giving me increasing motivation to make him run.)
Rocky is really irresistibly sweet. His awkwardness is so endearing. Also consider, if he didn’t take this chance with Adrian, he might not have the confidence he needs to step up later.
The Negatives:
If you’re like my daughter and me, you’ll cringe when Rocky gives his well-meant advice to Marie. It’s sincerely offered, but perhaps not delivered in the best way. At the very least, the delivery dates it. From my daughter’s point of view, if some random adult man advised her that words she used in speaking to her friends would cause her to be labelled a whore, she would steer clear of that guy and his demeaning advice. His advice isn’t entirely off base. There’s truth in what he’s saying, unfortunately. But in his desire to be helpful to Marie, he’s basically telling her that everyone she knows and hangs around with already thinks she’s a whore! Great, thanks. Perhaps Rocky doesn’t consider that he’s inadvertently shaming Marie in the same way that people are always shaming and undervaluing him. I mean, what he says to Marie isn’t that different from what Mickey said to him at the gym. That advice didn’t make him better. It just made him feel bad about himself. Her reply is kind of heartening, but I don’t think a film made today would include this interaction in the way it plays out here. Times have changed, and I’d like to think filmmakers would be cautious about telling young girls in the audience, “Scrutinize all previous conversations with your peers. Everyone who knows you probably already thinks you’re a whore. You’re welcome.”
The end of the first date with Adrian also plays out in somewhat cringe-worthy fashion. She keeps showing reluctance to be in his apartment, reluctance to kiss him, and he keeps pressuring her. The worst part of it is that he’s actually a nice guy. When a guy says, “Come on, I’m a nice guy,” but he’s actually a creep, it’s easy to respect your own boundaries. But when he keeps pushing those boundaries, and he legitimately is a nice guy, it makes you feel guilty and weird about respecting your own boundaries. I think it’s less than great to have what should be a romantic scene that the audience can feel good about begin in this way, where a woman is encouraged to disregard her own boundaries and instincts and then is rewarded for not trusting herself. (I read online that Adrian’s reluctance actually stemmed from the fact that Talia Shire had the flu and didn’t want to sicken Stallone, but I still feel like 1970s cute reads as 2020s cringe here.)
My only other disappointment is that “Eye of the Tiger” is not from the original Rocky. My sister once burned me a CD of workout music that included a remix of the song by Ice Cube and DMX that I’ve been thinking about lately for obvious sad reasons. I wish every Rocky movie contained every Rocky song. The audience would always come away feeling so motivated!
Overall:
Rocky seems like it got lost in the wrong decade. It’s a good old-fashioned, feel-good film that celebrates life and rewards courage. I’d be happy to watch it again any time.