Rocky II

Rocky II steers corrective, immediately re-telling and re-contextualising the climactic moments of the first film with the obvious benefit of a weightier approach to sound design. The fifteen round war that concluded John G Avildsen's Rocky was unusual in terms of how it described impacts: while we were privy to the exchange of in-ring grunts and whispers, the clubbing sound of fists colliding with flesh was so absent that, as a viewer, you weren't always sure if either man was actually being struck. The welts that had swollen Rocky's eyes shut told their own story but the lack of thwacks - not to mention the stage strikes that often very obviously failed to connect and a style of boxing from the Philadelphia native that completely elided any sort of defensive posture - left the concluding boxing match feeling strangely perfunctory, and even a little bit ridiculous. Writer-director Sylvester Stallone uses this sequel then as a way to race back to that moment; restaging the same conclusion in such a way that he can finally be happy with both the telling and the outcome. 

In fairness, Rocky II's centrepiece boxing match is a more engaging revision of the same basic premise. Where Avildsen's film opted for an observational stance on the two pugilists, Stallone places the viewer inside both boxer's heads. We see through their eyes: Rocky's cloudy point-of-view as he gazes out on bloodthirsty fans, his periphery struggling to focus thanks to an injured eye. The perspective of Carl Weathers' Creed is likewise swamped by his bruised and bloody opponent. Stallone's artfully distressed mug bobs raggedly, inches from Apollo's face. The language of Rocky II's fight does not ape the once-removed quality of a television broadcast, instead we have slow motion shock and angles that evoke a debilitating, cranial trauma. It's a style of communication designed solely to appraise the scale of Rocky's (eventual) victory and, in that respect, it works wonderfully. Unfortunately this aggressive sort of shorthand extends to the ways in which the rest of the film is structured and written. Rather than examine the next step for this flawed hero, Stallone feels obliged to tear all the goodwill down - in increasingly strained and unconvincing ways - as a route to returning his Rocky to same starting point as before. Talia Shire's Adrian suffers terribly under this new direction, reduced from a person who completes and compliments her partner to a horizontal fulcrum deployed to leverage a crass kind of sentimentality that actually ends up making the Balboa family seem emotionally alien. 

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.