GROSS/67 1976 - Rocky - simultaneously sweet and lofty and terribly dumb

Frank Capra somehow meets Bertolt Brecht.

GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

ROCKY; starring SYLVESTER STALLONE, TALIA SHIRE, BURT YOUNG, CARL WEATHERS, BURGESS MEREDITH; directed by JOHN G. AVILDSEN; written by SYLVESTER STALLONE; studio CHARTOFF-WINKLER PRODUCTIONS/UNITED ARTISTS; 119 minutes. WIKIPEDIA, IMDB, LETTERBOXD.

Here we go again - another movie I thought I knew, another leading man, another storyline I thought I had down. But no: another surprise, another wildly odd movie that somehow lodged itself in the popular consciousness and fooled us all.

It’s an anachronism

Rocky isn’t the movie you think it is. It’s not a gritty story of triumph over adversity set against post-war urban decay, ignorance and prejudice. It’s a time-travelling melodrama from another era. Rocky is a profoundly awkward creation that lands in the mid-seventies New Hollywood hothouse blinking innocently: an oddball throwback that unaccountably becomes a top-grossing movie right in the middle of the liberated 1970s. It took me a minute to pick up on this but this movie is so old-fashioned it feels like the producers voluntarily complied with the Hays Code, years after its rigid provisions had been dissolved and thrown out. I mean in this movie crime is actually punished; there’s no sex; there’s violence but it’s oddly childish (in one scene Rocky’s loanshark boss berates him for not breaking a deadbeat’s thumb). There isn’t even any swearing.

We’re seven or eight years into the New Hollywood regime. American cinema is supposed to be nervous, ambivalent, ironic, formally restless - sexy and violent. All the important films of the decade so far embody the paranoid style: harassed individuals against obscurely hostile systems, various kinds of defeat and disillusion: bitter creations like The Conversation, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Nashville. Rocky arrives among them like a weird uncle - in his old-fahioned suit, speaking yesterday’s language, inadequately hip, apparently standing for some very simple and old-fashioned values that everyone now finds laughable.

So this movie sticks out like a sore thumb and would be pretty easy to dismiss on half a dozen counts. As a sports film, Rocky is gauche, silly, technically ridiculous. The boxing scenes are hilariously inauthentic: Stallone flailing in the ring like, well, an actor pretending. He throws punches with the loose, theatrical wind-up of a man who learned the sport from watching the highlights on TV rather than from being clobbered at the gym (have you ever seen Harpo Marx boxing?). It’s mesmerising, the whole thing seems to have been choreographed for amateur dramatics. But none of this seems to matter.

The story is pure postwar schmaltz - from the period when cinemagoing was at its absolute peak and the audience was ready to accept practically anything so long as it was reassuring and uplifting. A working-class nobody gets a shot at dignity through discipline and a big heart, a plot that had been recycled through American culture since before the Depression and had hardened into cliché by the time Eisenhower left office. By the 1970s it was supposed to be dead. But Stallone revives it with such naked sincerity it feels less like a cliché and more like folklore.