Rocky review – 50 years on Stallone’s boxer remains a gritty contender

The actor’s triumphant breakthrough has clear ancestors in grimy tales of working-class struggle, but finds a fresh, rousing idealism Peter Farrelly’s new film I Play Rocky is about the underdog-with-heart story of how a great boxing movie got made against the odds with its plucky young untried screenwriter allowed to star. So here is a reissue of that 1976 film for its 50th anniversary. It’s a forthright, rousingly idealistic film, wholesome in its essential patriotism, and which unselfconsciously shrugs off the boxing-movie’s gloomy generic inheritance, throwing away its grim traditional baggage of tragedy, cynicism and loss. It also doubles as a love letter to Philadelphia, the cradle of American democracy. Its writer and insurgent star Sylvester Stallone created the role of Rocky Balboa, a punchy heavyweight fighter just turned 30, making peanuts slugging it out with bums and reduced to collecting debts for the Philly mob; this is an indignity which infuriates his grizzled old trainer and former mentor Mickey (Burgess Meredith) who once saw greatness in Rocky and is disgusted to see him selling out. Rocky is moreover entirely oblivious to national preparations to celebrate the 1976 bicentennial. (Boxing is for this anniversary what country music was in Robert Altman’s Nashville, only without the disorientation and pessimism.) Continue reading...