When Rocky premiered in 1976, it didn’t just capture the hearts of audiences—it also sparked a range of reactions from critics. Some hailed it as a powerful underdog story, while others dismissed it as sentimental Hollywood make-believe.
Roger Ebert praised Stallone’s performance and compared him to a young Marlon Brando, while Vincent Canby of The New York Times took a much harsher stance, calling Rocky “pure 1930s make-believe” and criticizing Stallone’s acting.
Despite the divided early reactions, Rocky would go on to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, cementing its place as one of the greatest sports films of all time. Below, we’ve gathered some of the original 1976 reviews—both good and bad—to give a true look at how Rocky was received in its early days.
The Hollywood Reporter
November, 1976
To describe Rocky as a movie about prize-fighting is about as helpful as saying that Marty, which it resembles in many ways, was a picture about butchering. Marty, you’ll remember, was a not-too-handsome but essentially decent sort of fellow who just happened to work in a butcher shop in the Bronx. Well, Rocky is a not-too-bright but essentially decent young man who just happens to be a third-rate heavyweight working out of a second-rate gym in South Philadelphia (and on the side, for eating money, breaks the thumbs of delinquent debtors on behalf of a local loanshark.) On paper, neither character may seem terribly appealing, but on the screen they steal your heart away, but completely.
Roger Ebert
January 1, 1976
She sits, tearful and crumpled, in a corner of her little bedroom. Her brother has torn apart the living room with a baseball bat. Rocky, the guy she has fallen in love with, comes into the room.
“Do you want a roommate?” she asks shyly, almost whispering.
“Absolutely,” says Rocky.
Which is exactly what he should say, and how he should say it, and why “Rocky” is such an immensely involving movie. Its story, about a punk club fighter from the back streets of Philly who gets a crack at the world championship, has been told a hundred times before. A description of it would sound like a cliche from beginning to end. But “Rocky” isn’t about a story, it’s about a hero. And it’s inhabited with supreme confidence by a star.
His name is Sylvester Stallone, and, yes, in 1976 he did remind me of the young Marlon Brando. 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. “I coulda been a contender,” Brando says in “On the Waterfront.” This movie takes up from there.
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. His world is a small one. 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’ll look broke”). In his spare time, he works out at Mickey’s gym. He coulda been good, but he smokes and drinks beer and screws around. And yet there’s a secret life behind his facade. He is awkwardly in love with a painfully shy girl (Talia Shire) who works in the corner pet shop. He has a couple of turtles at home, named Cuff and Link, and a goldfish named Moby Dick. 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.”
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. Rocky gets picked because of his nickname, the Italian Stallion; the champ likes the racial contrast. 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. 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. It’s about heroism and realizing your potential, about taking your best shot and sticking by your girl. It sounds not only clichéd but corny — and yet it’s not, not a bit, because it really does work on those levels. It involves us emotionally, it makes us commit ourselves: We find, maybe to our surprise after remaining detached during so many movies, that this time we care.
The credit for that has to be passed around. A lot of it goes to Stallone when he wrote this story and then peddled it around Hollywood for years before he could sell it. He must have known it would work because he could see himself in the role, could imagine the conviction he’s bringing to it, and I can’t think of another actor who could quite have pulled off this performance. There’s that exhilarating moment when Stallone, in training, runs up the steps of Philadelphia’s art museum, leaps into the air, shakes his fist at the city, and you know he’s sending a message to the whole movie industry.
The director is John Avildsen, who made “Joe” and then another movie about a loser who tried to find the resources to start again, “Save the Tiger.” Avildsen correctly isolates Rocky in his urban environment, because this movie shouldn’t have a documentary feel, with people hanging out of every window: It’s a legend, it’s about little people, but it’s bigger than life, and you have to set them apart visually so you can isolate them morally.
And then there’s Talia Shire, as the girl (she was the hapless sister of the Corleone boys in “The Godfather“). When she hesitates before kissing Rocky for the first time, it’s a moment so poignant it’s like no other. And Burt Young as her brother — defeated and resentful, loyal and bitter, caring about people enough to hurt them just to draw attention to his grief. There’s all that, and then there’s the fight that ends the film. By now, everyone knows who wins, but the scenes before the fight set us up for it so completely, so emotionally, that when it’s over we’ve had it. We’re drained.
Film: ‘Rocky,’ Pure 30’s Make-Believe
By Vincent Canby, The New York Times, Nov. 22, 1976
Not since “The Great Gatsby” two years ago has any film come into town more absurdly oversold than “Rocky,” the sentimental little slum movie that opened yesterday at the Cinema II.
As a former head of Paramount Pictures said to me with some irritation at the time “Gatsby” came out, movies shouldn’t be penalized for being effectively promoted. That’s true. Yet the sort of highpowered publicity (most of it free, it seems) that’s been attending the birth of “Rocky” must, in turn, subject the movie to impossible expectations that can boomerang. Be warned.
Sylvester Stallone, who had a role in “The Lords of Flatbush,” another “sleeper” that never quite measured up as a hit, both wrote the original screenplay and plays the title role. Rocky is a young man who, by day, is a small-time Mafia collector, the sort of fellow who shows his heart of gold by hesitating to break a client’s thumbs, and at night pursues a third-rate boxing career in fleabag sporting arenas.
Under the none too decisive direction of John G. Avildsen (“Joe,” “Save the Tiger”), Mr. Stallone is all over “Rocky” to such an extent it begins to look like a vanity production. His brother composed one of the film’s songs and appears briefly, as does his father, while his dog, a cheerful mastiff named Butkus, plays Rocky’s dog.
It’s as if Mr. Stallone had studied the careers of Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola and then set out to copy the wrong things. The screenplay of “Rocky” is purest Hollywood make-believe of the 1930’s, but there would be nothing wrong with that, had the film been executed with any verve.
It’s the story of Rocky and his girlfriend Adrian (Talia Shire), when Rocky, due to circumstances too foolish to go into, is granted the opportunity of his lifetime. He is given a chance to fight the heavyweight champion of the world, a black fighter named Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), modeled on Muhammad Ali so superficially as to be an almost criminal waste of character. It’s not good enough to be libelous, though by making the Alilike fighter such a dope, the film explores areas of latent racism that just may not be all that latent.
That Mr. Weathers is no actor doesn’t help things, though there are some very good actors in other supporting roles, and they don’t help in any significant way. Burt Young is effective as Rocky’s best friend, a beer-guzzling mug, as is Burgess Meredith as Rocky’s ancient trainer.
The person who comes off best is Miss Shire, Mr. Coppola’s sister who made brief, effective appearances in the two “Godfather” films. She’s a real actress, genuinely touching and funny as an incipient spinster who comes late to sexual life. She’s so good, in fact, that she almost gives weight to Mr. Stallone’s performance, which is the large hole in the center of the film.
Mr. Stallone’s Rocky is less a performance than an impersonation. It’s all superficial mannerisms and movements, reminding me of Rodney Dangerfield doing a nightclub monologue. The speech patterns sound right and what he says is occasionally lifelike, but it’s a studied routine, not a character.
It’s the sort of performance that could have been put together by watching other actors on television. Most of the film was photographed on location in seedy, Philadelphia neighborhoods, and it’s one of the film’s ironies that a production that has put such emphasis on realism should seem so fraudulent.
The problem, I think, comes back to Mr. Stallone. Throughout the movie we are asked to believe that his Rocky is compassionate, interesting, even heroic, though the character we see is simply an unconvincing actor imitating a lug.
“Rocky,” which has been rated PG (“parental guidance suggested”), contains some barroom language and a climactic boxing match that is effectively brutal.
