Avildsen more or less invented the training montage, a convention that would become a staple of American movies for about the next 20 years. But in the training montage, he becomes something else. He’s a spiritual descendent of someone like Ernest Borgnine in Marty. He’s a mess, and his life is not together at all. He yammers nervously, perpetually, in a slurry mutter of a voice. Rocky is a go-nowhere boxer and a small-time criminal. It’s a grey, ugly, slow-moving character study about a punchy, dimwitted lug.
Up until the training montage, Rocky belongs within the ranks of the ’70s dramas that clearly inspired it.
There’s a moment in the 1976 movie Rocky where the film we’re watching stops being a product of the American new wave and where it transforms before our eyes into the future of cinema. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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