Rocky (1976): Eitan’s Take

27Feb09

I have been so unfair to this film over the years. I had long been dreading it, mostly because I remembered it as a sloppy, saccharine, cliche piece of crap. But watching it this afternoon, I feel like I finally understand why Rocky has been part of our national conversation about film for so long. It’s not a great film, and it’s probably the hammiest and most hackneyed film to ever win Best Picture, but Christ, I find it nearly impossible to hate. This is one of those movies that really should not work as well as it does, and likewise, I’m not supposed to like it as much as I do. But here we are.

Stallone wrote the screenplay himself, which is why a) it’s mostly a refried cliche-fest and b) he gets all the best lines. It’s not a first-rate screenplay, but it lives and breathes and has a really wonderful authenticity to it. It’s funny to watch the scenes where Rocky is on TV promoting the fight, because he’s so timid in front of the cameras. When he’s in his natural habitat — greasy meat packing plants, run down homes, gritty back alleys with kids yelling “Yo Rocky!” — he’s funny and loose and just insanely charming. No, Rocky Balboa is not the first boxer-turned-bum to be the subject of a Best Picture winner (the honor also belongs to Brando’s Terry Malloy) and he may be a less nuanced character than other great film heroes, but when he’s yammering and wooing Adrian (a really wonderful Talia Shire, in a much better role than Connie Corleone) and running and throwing fists, it’s impossible to take your eyes off of him. At some points, you do want to yell at the screen, “we get it! You’re a no-goodnik goomba trying to make it big in a tough world!” And yet, he makes it all work. Whether it’s good acting or just sort of being the character — he was basically a nobody before this came out — is tough to tell.

The film benefits from being absolutely gorgeous. I had forgotten how amazing the cinematography was. Weirdly enough, it kept reminding me of the composition and camerawork I really adored in West Side Story — it has a lot of the same hues, the same rain-soaked back alleys, the same bleak buildings and parking lots. This is a textbook case of how to shoot gritty locations and make them look crisp, bright, and pretty. All you need to do is watch the awesome, iconic montage (which is the perfect mix of cheesy music, super-70’s camerawork, and astonishing editing) and you’ll get a sense of this film’s aesthetic strengths. It might even be possible that the great look of the film masks a lot of the other problems, but who am I to care?

One of my housemates used to have a sort of sleazy live-in boyfriend whose main virtue was his amazing stories about living and working in Philadelphia. He used to work in the cafe of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and he probably had ten or fifteen great stories about cheesy, hilarious ways that people used the “Rocky steps” — weddings, group photos, music videos, engagements, banquets. Rocky is an indelible part of our cultural landscape, and while it hits us over the head with its dopey-local-boy-makes-good storyline maybe a bit too often, we continue to celebrate the small joys of the “steps” scene because it speaks to the dumb, triumphalist American inside all of us. Yes, it beat out far better films (Network, Taxi Driver, and All the President’s Men), but as we all recall from Robert Altman’s Nashville, when the bicentennial came around, everyone was in the mood for some cheesy, life-affirming, lowbrow fare. I can’t believe I’m doing this, but 8/10.

P.S. One of my housemates just came in and said, “What movie did you just watch? Rambo?”

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Tags: Burgess Meredith, Burt Young, Carl Weathers, Eitan 8, Rocky, Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire