Rocky

Actor-screenwriter Sylvester Stallone's breakthrough role, at least in this first instance, feels very of a piece with television's Arthur Fonzarelli. Like the Happy Days Casanova, Stallone's Rocky is welcome everywhere and beloved by all. Unable to walk down the street without running into acquaintances or general well-wishers, Rocky enjoys a kind of social cache that goes beyond the basic fear that would likely be associated with a guy who works as muscle for the local loan shark. Although Burgess Meredith's growling gym trainer Mickey makes reference to legs having been broken in pursuit of payment, there's no evidence within this film that Rocky does much more than propose the idea of a beating when recouping cash for Joe Spinell's Mr Gazzo. Rocky's popularity instead motors on the ineffable respect of the neighbourhood main character; a quality that, in of itself, implies past glories. 

Set in Philadelphia in the 1970s, Rocky is practically Dickensian in its depiction of poverty. Stallone's motor-mouthed pugilist batters the film forwards as a throbbing oaf with a heart of gold, striving to make positive and long-lasting connections, despite his unjust and surprisingly squalid circumstances. In the early goings director John G Avildsen and cinematographer James Crabe seed their frame with empty beer bottles and crushed cans; an environmental clutter that speaks to how trapped and tranquilised Rock and his friends have found themselves. Mouldering apartments are lousy with stained doors that hang off their cabinets, each one peppered with dart pricks. Everything's breaking or broken anyway, so why take any pride in your surroundings? Although the opportunity to fight Carl Weathers' heavyweight boxing champion is the lottery win-level boon that ends up broadcasting Rocky's finer qualities to a larger audience, the real making of this man is his relationship with Talia Shire's pet shop clerk, Adrian. 

Shire's performance as Adrian, the way she communicates Stallone's thinly written role, is a greater success than anything that takes place inside a boxing ring. Shire allows the audience to see and experience the transformative effects of being in Rocky's orbit. At first Adrian and Rocky's relationship is based around pursuit: Rock repeatedly finding himself in her place of work, rambling ceaselessly and without prompt. Adrian, cowed by her colleagues and her brutish older brother, struggles to string a sentence together. Is she even interested in him? After a few run-ins with her thoroughly miserable sibling Paulie, who seems unduly interested in his sister's virginity, Adrian and Rocky find themselves in the boxer's rundown apartment. He corners her as she tries to leave, his pale muscular body dwarfing hers. He kisses her and she actually kisses him back, greedily even. Adrian wraps herself around Rocky, taking on his self-assurance and literalising Rocky's idea that the pair each have something that the other lacks. This assumption of an adult, interpersonal identity is the making of Adrian: she fights back against Paulie's venomous haranguing; she dresses to be noticed; and, at the film's conclusion, she has the confidence to push through a crowd to embrace her bleeding man.