Two more sad deaths from the entertainment world occurred on Friday; film and television actor Stephen Furst and Oscar-winning director John G. Avildsen.
Furst is perhaps best known for his role as Flounder in the hit 1978 comedy film National Lampoon's Animal House. He was a regular in the science fiction series Babylon 5 playing Centauri diplomatic attaché Vir Cotto. But for me personally, I will always have fond memories of his role in St Elsewhere as Dr. Elliot Axelrod. Alongside acting, Furst also worked as a director and producer. He died from complications with diabetes, something he has suffered with all his adult life.
RIP.
American film director John G Avildsen will forever be known as the Oscar-winning director of 1976's Rocky, but in a career that stretched back to 1970 with his debut feature Joe, Avildsen was responsible for many films including the stunning Save The Tiger, which earned Jack Lemmon a Best Actor Oscar and the first three films in the original Karate Kid franchise. He returned to the Rocky series with 1990's critically mauled Rocky V. Avildsen passed away following a battle with pancreatic cancer.
RIP.
Until last week, I hadn't seen Rocky V since the early '90s but as the credits rolled I instantly remembered an exchange between me and my sister and her then boyfriend from that first watch;
Me, on hearing the song over the credits: "Is that Elton John?"
My sister: "Yeah. Strange choice"
My sister's then boyfriend: "Not really, the amount of times he's been punished in the ring"
My sister: (Laughs)
Me: Elton John was a boxer?"
This has the ignoble achievement of being the very worst Rocky film in the franchise, coming just behind the dismal Rocky III. The problem is, where Rocky III (and Rocky IV) was unutterably cheesy, Rocky V commits the cardinal sin of being unbearable saccharine, introducing Sage Stallone as Rocky's kid and exploring the fault lines in the father and son relationship.
Well, I say it's Sage Stallone. I'm actually now almost convinced that it's the young Sacha Baron Cohen.
Whereas Rocky IV pays off by virtue of being a nostalgic treat, Rocky V just looks embarrassing. Maybe there will come a day when we look back at the fashions and trends of the early '90s and its godawful rap and naff hip hop as fondly as we currently do with the '80s, but that isn't happening now.
Which brings me to the awful continuity here. It was 1985 when Rocky fought Ivan Drago (we know this because Rocky tells Adrian they've been married 9 years, and he did indeed marry her in '76) yet when their plane touches down on American soil after that successful bout, it's somehow 1990 - meaning Rocky, Adrian and Paulie have been up in the air for five years. No wonder Rocky's accountant robbed him blind! Things get more complicated when Rocky's son is clearly older than he was when they left for the USSR (and he has a different head, but let's ignore that one for now - we all managed to ignore the fact that Creed's window was played by Mrs Huxtable in Creed, right?) and when Rocky later tries to appeal to his rapidly disillusioned sprog by reminding them of how they spent Christmas last year....um, mate, you were in Russia on Christmas last year, remember? No wonder the kid's pissed at you. Any more of this addled continuity and I'll start to think I'm the one with brain damage, not Rocky. This makes the longer hair/sudden weight loss that skewered the continuity between the first and second film look like nothing at all.
Anyway, Rocky's money has all gone and the docs advise him he has incurable brain damage from the beating he took at the hands of Drago, so he's forced to retire and return the family back to Philly. Now this is actually a great idea and it would seem a shrewd idea to bring the first film's director John G Avildsen back on board too. However, whilst its great to see Stallone returning the dumb lug character traits to Rocky (in no way is this the mature superman who we saw in III and IV, this really is the Rocky of the first and second film) neither he nor Avildsen can pull off a properly successful return to the series roots. The script is clunky and toothless, with exposition scenes sounding like they'd been written in crayon by infants, and the whole look of the film has something of the Hallmark TV movie about it.
Watching this as an 11 year old I was really happy to see Burgess Meredith return as Mickey in flashback (and a somewhat encouraging spectral presence in the final reel) However, what I didn't appreciate as a child is that originally, the relationship between contender and trainer was a much acerbic and complex one than the touching father and son depiction Rocky V has depicted in a revisionist fashion (and by way of something Cus D'Amato said about Mike Tyson) The original film is a lot more honest about how Mickey - who wrote Rocky off as a bum for having so little morality as to work for a loan shark - sees his own opportunity in Creed's unlikely offer to Rocky. It's actually quite a selfish gesture, but both men are wise enough to realise they perhaps need each other and there differences are ultimately put aside. None of that is depicted here, instead Mickey is seen as a twinkly wise old sage who always believed in Rocky and had his best intentions at heart.
Also coming back is Father Carmine ("I love it when he does that") Jane Marla Robbins as Gloria, the pet shop owner, and Jodi Letizia as Marie, the uncouth street kid that Rocky warned was on the way to being the neighbourhood whore in the first film, who is now - yup, you guessed it the neighbourhood whore. Well, she would have been back, if Avildsen didn't leave all her scenes on the cutting room floor. The character would return in the next film, Rocky Balboa, albeit played by Geraldine Hughes.
New faces this time around include the film's antagonists; George Washington Duke played by Richard Gant, a pretty obvious Don King style promoter, and tragic real life fighter Tommy Morrison and his godawful mullet as Tommy 'The Machine' Gunn - a character that at least proves that Stallone was always a sucker for a stupid name. Seriously, what is with that? Unfortunately the new characters are largely obnoxious and either played as such or played so underwhelmingly as to be irritating to the audience anyway; Morrison and Sage Stallone certainly fit into the latter category.
Rocky V was intended as the final film in the series. Indeed, Stallone originally wrote it with Rocky dying in Adrian's arms following the street fight with his protege Tommy Gunn. However, Stallone changed his mind during filming and the door was left open which has allowed us Rocky Balboa and Creed in recent years.
This was however Talia Shire's last contribution to the Rocky franchise as his loving wife, Adrian. Though she actually has a teensy bit more to do her than her usual 'I don't want you to do this, Rocky' scenes of the previous two movies, the film still squanders her. It does however give us an alarming and uncharacteristic insight into their sex life in the following exchange;
Rocky: "How 'bout I take you upstairs and violate you like a parking meter?"
Adrian: "It'll cost you a quarter"
Beggars belief really doesn't it?
Knockout Rating: 2 Punches out of 5.
So I watched Creed for the first time last week, which led me to revisit each of the Rocky films in turn. Starting with the original (and best) Rocky...
The making of Rocky is as much of an unlikely success story for the underdog as the one which occurs in the narrative. Shot in just 28 days for a budget of just over $1 million, Rocky went on to bag three Oscars - including Best Picture - and become the highest grossing film of 1976. Its legacy has seen a staggering six sequels (not bad for a film which features the climactic line "Ain't gonna be no rematch") its entrance into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for cultural significance, and remains a contender for the greatest sports move ever made.
Of course the most impressive factoid - especially for any budding writer - is that leading man Stallone wrote the script for Rocky in just three and a half days. His affection for the blue collar narrative of old Hollywood B movies and sporting memoirs bleeds through every page of that script and his dialogue is complete with several sharp jabs that immediately demand our attention and enjoyment.
I'd also forgotten just how funny Rocky is, with much of the best lines going to the scene-stealing Burgess Meredith as Rocky's tetchy old coach and former boxer Mickey ("Women weaken the legs" and "You're gonna eat lightning and crap thunder" are all eminently quotable and worthy of T shirt slogans) and some truly funny, sweet scenes revolving around Rocky's hesitant courtship of Adrian (Talia Shire) culminating on their first date at an out-of-hours ice rink - offset by the proprietor counting down the minutes Rocky has paid him to keep it open. It's also refreshing to see that, though Adrian is gradually and subtly brought out from the shadow of her abusive brother Paulie (Burt Young) and out of her dowdy shell by Rocky's affection, Stallone stayed away from the cliche of the ugly duckling who removes her glasses and shakes loose her hair to become the archetypal leading lady.
As Rocky, Stallone gives ostensibly his greatest ever performance. If Brando could have been a contender in On The Waterfront, Stallone's Balboa, an amiable lug who gets beaten to a pulp most nights and collects debts down at the docks for the local loan shark, gets the chance to prove himself in a wonderfully Capra-esque urban fairytale that sees current World Heavyweight Champ Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) offer a nobody the chance to be a somebody in keeping with the spirit of America. Similarly, Stallone was the underdog with the studio bosses too. They liked his script, but they liked Robert Redford, James Caan, Ryan O'Neal or Burt Reynolds for the leading role. Stallone fought as hard as the Italian Stallion to convince them he was the right man for the job and deliberately kept the budget low to counter any losses at having a less-established name head the picture.
As a film Rocky set the template not just for other big screen sporting dramas but for the subsequent instalments in the series too. Watching it back today I was actually surprised to see just how many beats from this original that the latest film in the series Creed actually riffed on - most notably how our underdog hits the canvas in the final reel, leading to the premature celebrations of the champ.
Knockout rating: 5 punches out of 5.
"Don't sell me America"
You know, I could watch Jack Lemmon writing out a shopping list and be happy. Primarily because I'd imagine he'd perform that task with the odd excited murmur about the things he was going to buy, followed by the gleam leaving his eye to be replaced by a mistiness as he realised some things are no longer available on the market.
His character in 1973's Save The Tiger, Harry Stoner, is a self confessed 'good citizen' who feels the world is changing for the worse, has many scenes of just such mercurial moods. Harry longs for a simpler, more honest time which he believes was his past when he was an aspiring drummer and devotee of baseball. But he was also a GI, Anzio cutting short his dreams of playing with a great big band orchestra, and the flashbacks he suffers suggests perhaps that his past is somehow rose tinted or selectively remembered. But when your present consists of juggling the books for your ailing rag trade business, hiring call girls to keep prospective buyers satisfied, keeping the mob's claws out of your interests and arranging for one of your factories to burn down, all in the space of a day and a half....well, perhaps you need a bit of selective memory.
One character remarks during the film that 'they never made a good movie in 30 years' but he's clearly wrong. Save The Tiger comes from what I perceive to be a truly great age of American cinema which, without accident, coincided around the time people began to get disenfranchised with 'The American Dream'. Nixon era/post Watergate America produced some great movies which concerned themselves with the dissatisfaction and failings of a country whose relatively brief moment in the sun looked set to flicker and fade out very shortly. Everything in Steve Shagan's dense script for Save The Tiger concerns itself with things souring, going rotten or getting old; the tigers are dying out, as a charity worker, informs Stoner whilst a hippy chick he picks up tells him they go in search of a beautiful place, recalled from their past, to die. An elderly chain smoking Russian cutter remarks that when he dies, he will have to be buried because he'd surely stink. Stoner's wife complains about rising gun crime and local high school students shooting horse in the toilets, whilst a buyer's wife is 'all scarred up' from too many life saving operations. Harry even wears the same suit two days running. This is an America, and an LA specifically, that is - to quote The Lovin' Spoonful - 'dirty, gritty'. Horrible to live through maybe, but incredibly satisfying to culturally dissect on the big screen. It's why British cinema in the 1980s was just as profoundly special.
