Rocky Review

The fighting takes up maybe fifteen minutes. The rest is a lonely man walking home through a cold city, talking to his turtles and failing to ask a shy woman out, and that is where the film earns its reputation. Sylvester Stallone wrote it fast and refused to sell it unless he could star, and the performance is nothing like the action figure the sequels turned him into: slow, embarrassed, kind, and aware that he is not very bright.

Talia Shire plays Adrian with almost no dialogue and builds a whole interior life out of posture. Burgess Meredith and Burt Young are both playing men who have run out of chances, and the four of them together are why the Academy handed this Best Picture over the decade's more ambitious films. John Avildsen shoots Philadelphia like a documentary and then reaches for the new Steadicam rig for the training run, and the climb up the museum steps became the most imitated image in American sports cinema.

The reservation critics raised then still holds. The story is predictable to the frame, the montage does emotional work the screenplay should be doing, and Apollo Creed is a cartoon standing next to four real people. It is a formula picture that happens to be the version everyone else has been copying since.