On Screen
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen THE PERFORMING SELF BY ROBERT ASAHINA JUDGING FROM two new movies, Hollywood seems to have rediscovered the proletariat. Rocky, directed by John Avildsen (Joe; Save the Tiger), is the...
...instead, the ambitious exhibition of the performing self in the former and the general moderation and restraint in mounting the fife of the performer in the latter are genuine esthetic virtues...
...Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, last seen in The Lords of Flatbush), a pathetically self-styled "Italian Stallion" of Philadelphia's seamy fight club circuit, a has-been at the age of 30, gave up his chance to be a serious contender when he took a job as an enforcer for a local loan shark...
...The anguish of dustbowl life has probably never been so vividly pictured in the movies-a tribute to the skill of cinematographer Haskell Wexler...
...His low-key acting is deliberately unheroic and nonlegendary...
...The relationship between Balboa and Adrian is mostly a romantic implausibility...
...During the '50s, this striving for middle-class respectability was a favorite theme of Paddy Chayevsky, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, and many others...
...Neither his unexpected tenderness nor her sudden blossoming (by the end of the movie she has even ceased to appear homely) is sufficiently motivated...
...with Robert Ryan) or Rob-son's The Harder They Fall (1956...
...and his struggles as a union activist...
...After he leaves them behind, he lives a carefree life and takes up with several other women...
...As a fight film, Rocky is among the best I have ever seen...
...They are no doubt intended to provide a sense of Guthrie's personal life, but whether they are based in fact or not, they are rendered in a trite fashion that destroys all credibility...
...with Humphrey Bogart...
...In its bare outlines, therefore, Rocky may seem somewhat anachronistic...
...Happily, it is neither sanctimonious nor vacuous...
...This compelling conceit is an ironic comment on the American success story that was seen in vastly different terms in the '50s...
...From hitchhiking to hopping freight cars, from brawls to one-night stands, it evokes one of the most potent myths of American culture-the freedom of the traveling vagabond...
...Following writers like Mailer, he sees the ring as an arena for the dramatic unfolding of the self's possibilities...
...We know that our hero is sensitive because he has pets (Brando's Terry Malloy kept pigeons in On the Waterfront), refuses to be unnecessarily brutal toward the hapless victims of his underworld bosses, and falls in love with the intelligent but unattractive Adrian (Talia Shire, last seen in The Godfather...
...The two offerings cover much the same ground as the typical socially conscious films of earlier decades, yet manage to rise above facile preaching about society's ills...
...with Kirk Douglas), and easily the equal of Robert Wise's The Set-Up (1949...
...If it had nothing else to recommend it, Rocky would be noteworthy because the ambitions of lower-class white ethnics have not been regarded as suitable cinematic material for some 20 years...
...In the climax of the film, Rocky loses the bloody title bout but manages to "go the distance," finding in defeat a dignity that had previously eluded him...
...his growing political awareness among the migrant farm workers in the valley...
...These scenes stand out as padding in an already overiong (two-and-a-half-hour) movie...
...the artist's own struggle for identity finds its perfect "objective correlative" in the figure of the boxer, who submits himself to the most naked and brutal test possible in a civilized society...
...his adventures on the road after leaving his wife and children to find work in California...
...The film is confined to roughly five stages of Guthrie's early life: his days as a signpainter in the dust-bowl town of Pampa, Texas...
...Somehow, though, he has preserved his humanity...
...What ultimately enables the movie in its best moments to transcend all the cliches and avoid lapsing into a lame parable about reverse discrimination, however, is its strong and authentic expression of artistic personality-again Stallone's, not Avildsen's, pace the auteurists...
...Before seeing it, I had feared most that it would be a pious, empty attempt to honor Woody Guthrie in standard Hollywood fashion-by making him into a tinsel legend...
...his blossoming radio career and reunion with his family in Los Angeles...
...Stallone has sought to bring his own vision to us in a boxing movie-instead of pursuing a more straightforward autobiographical approach, as Martin Scorsese did in Mean Streets-and the tension between the stock situations and his private impulses is very effective...
...Guthrie emerges as a really common uncommon man-with human weaknesses and strengths that present themselves without any need for Hollywood's hyped-up staging of dramatic conflict...
...ambition had come to be seen as a curse...
...and the struggle of white ethnics for assimilation was overshadowed by other minorities' battles...
...Unfortunately, what these dramatists produced was often as commonplace as their subject matter- small works about small people...
...It gives us the reemergenee of the white ethnic hero in the ironic guise of a "Great White Hope,' whose triumph lies not in victory but merely in refusing to be knocked out by a popular and vastly superior black champion...
...Although this cannot obscure the film's lapses, it infuses Rocky with a naive spirit that is particularly refreshing in our age of jaded, self-conscious cinema...
...THE EAKEST sequences cover Guthrie's relationship with his wife and children...
...The success of Bound For Glory springs from a different source...
...By a complicated and rather contrived series of events, Rocky gets a shot at the heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers out of Muhammed Ali...
...Save the Tiger), is the story of a boxer from the white street-corner society of Philadelphia...
...As Pampa is about to be struck by a dust storm, one terrifyingly brief shot of the black cloud, just before it sweeps through the town, eloquently captures the insignificance of civilization against the menace of nature...
...with John Garfield) or Mark Robson's Champion (1949...
...Yet the film does add a surprising and engrossing twist to our reflexive sympathy for the plight of society's underdogs...
...It is better than Robert Rossen's Body and Soul (1947...
...Indeed, Wexler's craft is emphasized by the decision to use color, rather than exploit the black-and-white images we carry in our minds from the Depression-era photographs of Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange...
...What, after all, could have been more natural than to be concerned about the plight of the migrants during the Depression...
...It comes as a jolt when he suddenly brings his brood out to California to join him, and the story then declines into a traditional Hollywood show-business biography: the ambitious artist committed to a larger cause (his music and the union), the loving wife who wants him to spend more time with the kids, the marital squabbles and reconciliations, the final and inevitable breakup...
...The script is so sincerely conceived by writer Stallone and the hero is given such animation by aotor Stallone that Rocky ceases to be simply a stock character and becomes the artistic embodiment of his creator's persona...
...Because boxing is at the intersection of so many competing interests- commercial, criminal and personal -it can be a trap for simple-minded social realists, a too-easy metaphor of the existential struggle...
...Shampoo), is based on the autobiography of Woody Guthrie and tells of his early days as a signpainter, hobo, struggling musician, and union activist in the depths of the Depression...
...Bound for Glory, directed by Hal Ashby (The Last Detail...
...In fact, they reach the level of genuine, albeit modest, movie art...
...There is some effort to drum up excitement by continually bringing up the physical menace of the thugs hired to break up the union's organizing activities among the farm workers, but most of his politicization comes about in a remarkably untendentious context...
...it moved a normally cynical audience to cheers at the screening I attended...
...Much of my enjoyment of both Rocky and Bound for Glory had to do with the overcoming of negative expectations...
...I coulda been a contender...
...And by the '60s, "making it" was a tired theme: "Middle class" had become a favorite epithet of the children of the bourgeoisie...
...This is disturbing, for the rest of the movie conveys a solid authenticity that springs, in part, from its studied off-handedness...
...Ashby wisely recognized that it is not necessary to hammer the obvious...
...Guthrie's political involvement, the cause of the conflict with his wife, is similarly treated in a matter-of-fact manner...
...I coulda been somebody-instead of a bum, which is what 1 am," he was giving choked articulation to the hopes and frustrations of an entire generation...
...The final battle is powerfully staged...
...David Carradine, for example, gives a marvelously unpretentious performance in the lead...
...In On the Water-front (1954), when Marlon Brando said, "I coulda had class...
...To be sure, Rocky stumbles badly at some points...
...The soft, fine dust that permeates the air gives the early scenes a beautiful and oppressive golden haze...
...The movie hits its stride as it follows Guthrie to the Coast...
...Moreover, in its treatment of the petty greed of Rocky's friend (Burt Young) and manager (Burgess Meredith), the movie skirts dangerously near a more serious pitfall, sentimental sermonizing...
...This is a credit not to Avildsen, whose clumsy cutting to reaction shots of the ringside crowd distracts from the rhythm of the sequence, but to the brutally realistic grace of Weathers and especially Stallone, who is also credited with both the "boxing choreography" and the screenplay...
...Both films could very well have been hackneyed bits of sentimentality...
Vol. 59 • November 1976 • No. 23
