Art Vs Commerce: Dawn of the Blockbuster (1970s)

1976

After six years of handing Best Picture to the Miss Congeniality of box office hits, right as Art and Commerce were about to split in a major way… for this year, they managed to get along, because a precision-designed crowd-pleaser was just too good not to win.

(Also it wasn’t a Jaws-level blockbuster, nothing was in 1976, blockbusters were still in their infancy.)

The Joint Champion

I can talk a lot about the halcyon days of Young Al Pacino and Give-a-Shit Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson’s unhinged moments in Cuckoo’s Nest, but here’s something we forgot about over the years… Sylvester Stallone is actually really good when he wants to be. Stallone got two Oscar nominations for Rocky, as lead actor and for his original screenplay (he lost both to Network). That’s right, Sylvester Stallone has an Oscar nomination for writing, and it’s because he put his whole heart into this story of an underdog palooka given one shot to prove he can go toe-to-toe with the heavyweight champ.

We know the Rocky series mostly from its low points: fighting Mr. T and Hulk Hogan, the hyper-jingoistic battle against the Soviets that was Rocky IV, buying his pal Paulie a robot butler. But in the beginning Rocky was so much more. Hell, there’s less than 20 minutes of actual boxing in the movie. The rest is Rocky just trying to get by, to do good, to find love with a woman who isn’t sure she deserves it. Rocky is all of Stallone’s pain and fears about his struggling acting career funneled into the story of one man trying to prove that he’s more than just a nobody, that he can go the distance.

And the performances are all strong: Stallone makes Rocky incredibly vulnerable despite his physical strength, Godfather’s Talia Shire takes meek, withdrawn Adrian on a journey as she learns to accept love, Batman: The Movie’s Burgess Meredith is great as the over-the-hill gym owner who hates what Rocky had made of himself so far but wants to help him make the most of his one big chance, Predator’s Carl Weathers is effective as champion Apollo Creed… Whatever Rocky became as the sequels mounted up and the franchise got a little silly, the first instalment is a powerful and moving story.

And the same thing happened with First Blood a few years later. First Blood is a very well-made action thriller that digs into what Vietnam did to American soldiers, and the often harsh treatment that was waiting for them at home. Then it became the ultra-violent yay-war franchise we know it as. Stallone created characters of real depth and gave some good, even great performances as Rocky Balboa and John Rambo, then used them to play to Reagan’s America by winning big, splashy, symbolic victories over Vietnam and Russia.

And that might sound like a condemnation, but it isn’t, not really. Stallone broke out huge with Rocky, but until First Blood struggled to land a hit that wasn’t a Rocky sequel. So if milking Rocky and Rambo, and making big, crowd-pleasing action franchises out of them was what the audience wanted, then that’s what he’d give them. If you were to ask me “Would you like one big success people will be talking about for decades, or to tarnish it a little by over-milking it but make millions of dollars,” you’d best fetch me a pail and a stool.

Overall I think the Rocky franchise is more good than bad. I haven’t watched Rocky III through V, which as far as I can tell range from “goofy but okay” to “massive misstep,” but Rocky Balboa and the Creed movies really brought the franchise back to its roots (even if Creed 2 started to slip away just like Rocky II did… Rocky II is still good but the journey to Rocky IV had begun). It’s probably the most personal franchise to Stallone, as he’s written or co-written seven out of eight, all but but the first Creed, and the movies seem to reflect stages of his career in ways that Rambo and The Expendables and their refusal to acknowledge Stallone’s advancing age very much didn’t. And Rocky certainly started on a high note.

And Rotten Tomatoes Says: It comes in down at #43, two spots under All The King’s Men (Pshaw! Pshaw I say!), citing it as “predictable,” and I don’t know that I fully agree, as I’ll explain below.

What’s New, Hollywood? Rocky doesn’t win. He proves he can go the distance, he proves he’s more than some palooka, but he doesn’t win. Now I can’t be sure that’s new, per se, I haven’t seen every underdog sports movie, and since I don’t have a Patreon I owe rewards to you can’t make me. But when the point of an underdog story is that by god they showed up and held their ground, and that’s worthy of respect, people point to Rocky. (It’s certainly the point of Rocky Balboa and Creed.)

Other Events in Film

  • This Year in Martin Scorsese Movies: A whole bunch of classic movies from Scorsese weren’t box office champs or awards darlings, which honestly feels like an indictment of movie-goers and the Academy. This year’s example? Taxi Driver, which young filmgoers might know as “Joker but good.”
  • All the President’s Men had Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodward and Bernstein in the story of the Watergate scandal. Man I should give that a watch, seems 1976 had some bangers this project doesn’t cover. Also might be nice to look back at the days when a scandal this big meant the president did the right thing and resigned, and nobody did an insurrection to defend him.
  • Family Plot, the final film of Alfred Hitchcock, and The Shootist, the final film of John Wayne, are released.
  • After Rocky, the top hits are all about the remakes, with Barbra Streisand’s turn doing A Star is Born at number two, and a weirdly sexual King Kong at number three.
  • Rocky Horror Picture Show’s reign as a midnight movie begins.
  • 1976’s Bound for Glory is the first film made with Garrett Brown’s Steadicam.
  • Laurence Olivier asks Dustin Hoffman two iconic questions in Marathon Man: in the movie is “Is it safe?” and behind the scenes was “Why not just act?”
  • Bugsy Malone is worth noting for being a gangster movie with an all-kid cast, in which cream pies replace murder weapons, it’s very weird in a unique way.
  • Clint Eastwood continued to juggle cops and cowboys, releasing The Outlaw Josey Wales and a third Dirty Harry, The Enforcer, in one year.
  • Silver Streak is the first film partnership of Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.

Next Page: The Art/Commerce gulf widens

Author: danny_g

Danny G, your humble host and blogger, has been working in community theatre since 1996, travelling the globe on and off since 1980, and caring more about nerd stuff than he should since before he can remember. And now he shares all of that with you.

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