Rocky in Review, Part 1: The First 3 Rocky Movies And a Changing American Cinema

Kicking off a new Thursday review series with the original Rocky classics

Starting today and continuing on Thursdays for the foreseeable future, I’ll be publishing reviews of classic movies, pieces that have never appeared here before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). Given last week’s passing of the great Carl Weathers - Apollo Creed himself, among many other wonderful characters - I thought we’d start with a few weeks on the Rocky movies. Today’s piece covers the first three movies together. Enjoy!

Rocky - 1976, Dir. John G. Avildsen

Rocky II / III - 1979/1982, Dir. Sylvester Stallone

Originally written September 27^th, 2023

The original Rocky competed at the Academy Awards with Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and Sidney Lumet’s Network for Best Picture (alongside Hal Ashby’s fictionalized Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory, though nobody talks about that one), and in the Film Studies circles I swim in, the film is often mocked for dethroning those three undisputed mid-70s masterpieces with its victory. This was, certainly, one of the single most striking Best Picture line-ups the Oscars have ever had, and I understand the sentiment that Rocky feels a bit like the odd film out. The argument more or less goes that, when the Oscars were confronted with multiple films that stared straight into the heart of darkness of 1970s America, that reflected back brilliant and biting observations which continue to resonate with as much or more power and relevance today, the Academy instead went with the ‘safe,’ ‘feel-good’ choice instead. I certainly won’t deny that Rocky was up against three historically great, important films; Network in particular is about as prescient a film as has ever been made in Hollywood, and if I were making a list of the ‘best’ films ever made, Lumet’s film would probably find its way there before Rocky.

But I will still defend Rocky winning the 1976 Best Picture statue, because I think the choice is more complicated than it simply being the ‘feel good’ option amidst several ‘darker’ films. In many ways, Rocky is just as much a defining 1970s movie as the films it competed against; its cinematography is gritty and textural, its world rough and unvarnished, everything aggressively ground level and on location, and it tells a story about the working class being ground out of existence and fighting back against its own destruction. The world of Rocky is, in many ways, the world of Taxi Driver and Network and all the other celebrated ‘feel-bad’ masterpieces of the 1970s, which is precisely why Rocky Balboa’s dreams are so limited. Considering just this first film and ignoring where the sequels took the character, Rocky isn’t out to get famous, or become rich, or even win the big match – he’s out to prove something, but not even necessarily to other people. He just needs to prove to himself that he matters, that he is alive, that he can ‘go the distance’ and stick it out in this crazy, brutal world. His goals are externalized through boxing, but they are almost entirely internal; even ‘getting the girl’ isn’t really what his fight is about, because he woos Adrian just by being himself, a kind and decent and sort of goofy guy who looks out for others and proves himself a reliable, loving partner long before the third act rolls around.