For example, in the film’s most powerful scene, Mickey (Burgess Meredith, also nominated for an Oscar), the aged gym owner, delivers a long, croaky-voiced speech about how he, too, could have been a contender back in the 1920s, if only he hadn’t lacked the “management” he offers Balboa now. Again and again, Rocky gets close to the painful realities of life, only to hit the brakes and do a U-turn. After one kiss from Balboa, she never needs her granny glasses again. But on the other hand, Adrian not only falls in love with her hulking stalker, she has her eyesight magically improved by his attentions. On the one hand, the film has a chronically shy heroine, Adrian (Talia Shire), who is bullied into going a date with Balboa by her abusive and parasitic brother Paulie (Burt Young, who was Oscar-nominated for the role). But on the other hand, it assures us that the loan shark (Joe Spinell) is a fundamentally decent fellow who hands Balboa $500 for training expenses, and then graciously withdraws from his life. On the one hand, it has a hero who, as well as being a small-time club fighter, is a loan shark’s debt collector. He will fight an unknown local boxer, and he will market this David-v-Goliath match as proof that America is still the land of opportunity. When his opponent pulls out due to injuries, and no other ranked contenders are available, Creed comes up with what he imagines to be a brilliant publicity stunt. The premise is that Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), the Muhammad Ali-alike world heavyweight champion, has scheduled a match in Philadelphia to coincide with the US’s bicentennial celebrations. Much later, in the climactic championship bout, Avildsen resorts to very low lighting and tight framing to disguise the fact that a supposedly colossal showbiz event has about as many spectators as a high-school table-tennis tournament.īut even accounting for its shoestring budget, Rocky has plenty of rocky patches. In the opening backstreet boxing match, it’s clear that most of the punches don’t connect – that is, you can see that the actors were deliberately missing each other – but there was no money for retakes. The shortcuts and compromises are apparent. Stallone, who scripted Rocky as well as starring in it, was an unknown at the time, so Avildsen had to keep costs down, shooting the entire film in 28 days. It’s only fair to acknowledge that the film’s director, John G Avildsen, was effectively fighting with one hand tied behind his back.
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