What makes the movie extraordinary is that it doesn't try to surprise us with an original plot, with twists and complications it wants to involve us on an elemental, a sometimes savage, level. And even here the movie looks like a genre fight picture from the 1940s, right down to the plucky little gymnasium manager ( Burgess Meredith) who puts Rocky through training, and right down to the lonely morning ritual of rising at four, drinking six raw eggs, and going out to do roadwork. Rocky gets picked because of his nickname, the Italian Stallion the champ likes the racial contrast. The movie ventures into fantasy when the world heavyweight champion ( Carl Weathers, as a character with a certain similarity to Muhammad Ali) decides to schedule a New Year's Eve bout with a total unknown - to prove that America is still a land of opportunity. After he wins forty bucks one night for taking a terrible battering in the ring, he comes home and tells the turtles: "If you guys could sing and dance, I wouldn't have to go through this crap." When the girl asks him why he boxes, he explains: "Because I can't sing and dance." He has a couple of turtles at home, named Cuff and Link, and a goldfish named Moby Dick. He is awkwardly in love with a painfully shy girl ( Talia Shire) who works in the corner pet shop. And yet there's a secret life behind his facade. He coulda been good, but he smokes and drinks beer and screws around. In his spare time, he works out at Mickey's gym. By day, he works as an enforcer for a small-time juice man, offering to break a man's thumbs over a matter of $70 ("I'll bandage it!" cries the guy. It inhabits a curiously deserted Philadelphia: There aren't any cars parked on the slum street where Rocky lives or the slightest sign that anyone else lives there.
"I coulda been a contender," Brando says in " On the Waterfront." This movie takes up from there. How many actors have come and gone and been forgotten who were supposed to be the "new Brando," while Brando endured? And yet in "Rocky" he provides shivers of recognition reaching back to " A Streetcar Named Desire." He's tough, he's tender, he talks in a growl, and hides behind cruelty and is a champion at heart. His name is Sylvester Stallone, and, yes, in 1976 he did remind me of the young Marlon Brando.
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