Cinema Speculation

Paradise Alley

(1978)

The first time movie audiences got a taste of Sylvester Stallone’s voice as an artist (writer/actor) wasn’t 1976’s Rocky, but 1974’s The Lords of Flatbush. It’s a low-budget New York independent film directed by Martin Davidson, who would go on to have a nice little filmography that would include the like-minded Eddie and the Cruisers, Hero at Large (after Lords, my favorite), Almost Summer (which enjoys a very very tiny cult following among devotees who saw it when it came out), and the William Petersen & Sissy Spacek nineties romantic comedy Hard Promises (which, apparently, I alone like), and codirected by Stephen Verona, who would go on to direct the ill-fated Gladys Knight–starring feature film vehicle Pipe Dreams, which costarred her sketchy ex-husband.

The Lords of the title are a group of four Brooklyn street toughs—too small to actually call a gang—they’re more like four buddies who just had jackets made up and wear them all the time. Stallone’s Stanley (hands down the biggest and the meanest), Perry King’s Chico (the handsomest), Henry Winkler’s Butchey (the smart aleck of the group and the one Jew among the three Italians), and Paul Mace’s Wimpy (the little guy and the most authentically New York member of the crew. You can spot Mace hanging out with the other junkies in Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park). The film follows their lives and loves (really only Chico and Stanley) in doo-wop era fifties New York. This shoestring-budgeted independent feature was made for nothing and filmed in a bare-bones manner. It was either shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm, or it just looks like a 16mm blow up (the interior lighting captures to a tee the Roger Corman cinematography maxim “Get an image”). Yet, miraculously, it was picked up for distribution by a major studio (Columbia Pictures) and paired with the amazing fifties time capsule wonder Let the Good Times Roll (one helluva concert film, and apparently in its initial first run engagement Columbia even struck 70mm prints!). The reason Columbia picked up this grubby-looking independent feature and stuck their grand lady with a torch logo on the front of it was . . . well, it’s a really good movie.

But also, the success that Universal had with American Graffiti precipitated—right smack dab in the seventies—a large wave of romanticized fifties nostalgia, which at one point threatened to engulf the entire decade. A nostalgia that I, as a little boy, was especially susceptible to (back then I loved everything fifties and prided myself on my wealth of fifties trivia knowledge).

During this tsunami-like wave of fifties ephemera came oldies-based radio stations, and fifties hit collections sold on TV (most people my age first learned who Chubby Checker was from these commercials). After a fall from grace during the hippie sixties, James Dean was reintroduced to the pop culture zeitgeist (you could buy his posters in head shops again, right next to Tim Curry’s Frank-N-Furter), and The Wild One replaced both On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire as the seminal Brando film (again, those were the pictures and posters sold in head shops). And on TV there was the American Graffiti inspired hit situation comedy Happy Days (lest we forget Ron Howard starred in both), and then later its feminine opposite number Laverne & Shirley. And last, but certainly not least, the ascendancy of Henry Winkler’s Fonzie to the schoolyard pop culture stratosphere (I just watched The Goodbye Girl again recently and was amused to see a poster of Fonzie prominently hanging on the wall of Quinn Cummings’ bedroom). Well, some sly shrewd fox over at Columbia noticed that not only was The Lords of Flatbush fifties-based like American Graffiti, but it also sported Fonzie among its cast. Now except for the smart cookie at Columbia who picked up on that, the rest of the industry hadn’t yet realized what a big deal that was. But to us schoolkids that was a very big deal! So even though Henry Winkler didn’t really have a tremendous amount of screen time,* Columbia Pictures cut together a terrific TV spot that featured Henry Winkler’s footage (Fonzie’s drawing power among young schoolkids was no joke), and the best and most catchy commercial jingle ever written for a movie TV spot, which I can sing perfectly to this day. All this made the movie both a modest success and a very fondly remembered artifact of its era.

And like American Graffiti before it, and Dazed and Confused after it, Lords had a cast of young actors who would distinguish themselves in the future. Obviously, both Stallone & Winkler, but also the lovely and talented Susan Blakely (who was almost unbelievably beautiful), who starred with Nick Nolte and Peter Strauss in the first official miniseries (which they called “a novel for television”), Rich Man, Poor Man, and in my opinion, the better Frances Farmer movie. In Lords she plays Jane, the (relatively) rich WASP beauty from the other side of the tracks that Chico falls head over heels for (the song You and Me that accompanies their dates together is one of the film’s terrific song score’s highlights. A song score written by disgraced tunesmith Joe Brooks). And as Chico, Perry King, who for a while had a string of feature film leads in interesting movies like Mandingo, The Possession of Joel Delaney, The Choirboys, Foster & Laurie, and A Different Story, till by the eighties he was wearing Hawaiian shirts and drinking out of coconuts on TV’s Riptide.

The story goes King was a replacement for the role of Chico. Originally Chico was played by a young Richard Gere, three years before his breakout roles in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Days of Heaven. And, apparently, Stallone and Gere hated each other so much that Stallone kicked his ass and then Gere either quit or was fired. Another humorous element of Stallone’s “Lords Legacy,” after super producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler read the Rocky script and wanted to make it, they were told they had to do it with the author as the lead.

“Well, what has he done before?” they incredulously asked.

Stallone’s agent said, “He’s the lead of Lords of Flatbush.”

So naturally they screened the film and were completely beside themselves with excitement about the actor and his potential to play a great Rocky . . . because they thought Perry King was Sylvester Stallone!

While I’ve always felt The Lords of Flatbush spent too much footage on the Chico-Jane relationship, their breakup scene, set to a breakup version of their song You and Me, has always punched me in the heart. It’s after that scene you realize how good this dinky little movie really is.

In retrospect, watching The Lords of Flatbush when it came out was an interesting experience for the fourth-grade me. Because it was the first time I was introduced to the New York independent low-budget film aesthetic. Before I saw Mean Streets, I saw Lords. Before I saw Claudia Weil’s Girlfriends, I saw Lords. Before I saw Jim Jarmusch movies, I saw Lords. Before I saw Smithereens, I saw The Lords. And I liked it and my friends liked it. Though we all felt a little gypped that Fonzie didn’t have more to do. But the film’s cast was excellent. Along with who I’ve already mentioned, there was disco’s court jester Paul Jabara, the beautifully annoying Renee Paris as Annie, Chico’s disposable sex partner (even that’s too romantic a description for what she is), and best of all the great Maria Smith as Stanley’s longtime, long suffering, but ultimately triumphant girlfriend, Frannie. And to this day, Smith remains Stallone’s best female on-screen partner. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find out he originally wrote the role of Adrian in Rocky for Smith. As good as everybody is, it’s Stallone and Smith who dominate the movie. Stallone not only dominates the screen as Stanley, he wrote or rewrote many of the scenes he’s in—earning him that long ago banished from the Writers Guild credit, Additional Dialogue. And frankly anyone familiar with Stallone’s witty street-smart dialogue can tell. Especially in two of the film’s best scenes. One, a very Brandoesque monologue delivered by Stallone to King next to his rooftop pigeon coop. And the other, which is not only the film’s best scene, but one of the standout scenes in seventies independent cinema, where Stanley’s fiancée Frannie lures him into a jewelry store to purchase an engagement ring the poor slob clearly can’t afford. The scene that follows is hilariously funny, hilariously real, and even a touch sad. Throughout the entire film Stallone’s Stanley is a beast. In any other movie he’d be the bully bad guy of the piece. It’s only Stallone’s sarcastic witticisms, said out of the corner of his mouth, that keep him vaguely sympathetic (though sympathetic is way too strong an adjective). But at the height of the hysteria that Frannie and her best friend Annie create in the jewelry store, you actually realize how over his head the big gorilla is. The scene ends in a tremendous victory for Frannie. But also, despite Stanley’s brutish behavior throughout the film, we realize the depth of feeling he has for Frannie. And we never look at him the same way again. It’s really a wonderful scene, and Stallone’s writing fingerprints are all over it.

After his success with Rocky (both as writer and star), Stallone would give interviews and journalists would ask how he started writing.

He famously said he started trying to write screenplays after he saw Easy Rider. He remarked, “I could do at least as good as that.”

So after Lords—and sometime before Rocky—Stallone penned his magnum opus, the mini street epic Hell’s Kitchen. The script is a hodgepodge of every Warner Bros. street film, Clifford Odets play, and Damon Runyon story Stallone had ever seen or heard. But while those are the touchstones that Stallone and the critics cited at the time of release, the script’s true inspiration was the East Side Kids series of films made by Monogram Studios in the forties (it’s why even though the film feels like it should take place during the Depression, it actually takes place after World War II). By the time Stallone eventually made the film, post-Rocky, and now rechristened Paradise Alley with Stallone himself at the helm, those East Side Kids movies were enjoying a renewed wave of popularity on local television stations all over America (primarily due to their public domain status). In Los Angeles on KHJ-TV’s channel 9, they played every Saturday at ten o’clock, right after the Saturday morning cartoons wrapped up, and two hours before Soul Train aired on the same station.

The East Side Kids movies starred Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, and (sometimes) Gabriel Dell. Now more often than not, when people refer to the East Side Kids, they confuse them with the Bowery Boys, as if the two groups and two film series were interchangeable. Which, since Gorcey and Hall starred in both and played similar characters, is understandable. That is—understandable—if you’ve never seen the two different series. If you have, you know the two series are vastly different in both style and quality. Almost every film in the East Side Kids series is pretty fucking good, and almost every film in the Bowery Boys series is pretty fucking lousy.

For the uninitiated, a little history might be required. Now this gets a little complicated, so keep up. One of the most successful shows on Broadway in the thirties was the Sidney Kingsley play Dead End. It was a socially conscious drama about life in the slums of New York. Almost all other stories of its type, whether it’s Blackboard Jungle, or Boulevard Nights, or Boyz n the Hood is a descendant of Dead End.

The big sensation of the play were the young street kids who played the juvenile delinquents in the show, Billy Halop, Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey, Bobby Jordan, and Gabe Dell. They were so popular they became known as the Dead End Kids. And for a while, the boys were one of the most successful acting ensembles in the history of Hollywood. Jack Warner put them under contract and began putting them in Warner Bros. crime pictures alongside their biggest gangster film stars, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Pat O’Brien (but not Bette Davis or Errol Flynn). They did seven films for Warner Bros. as the Dead End Kids. And some of them were the best Warner movies of their era, including the greatest Warner gangster movie of all time, Angels with Dirty Faces. As good as the films they did at Warner’s were, I always had a bit of a problem with the Dead End Kids.

In Dead End the kid with the biggest part was Billy Halop. So consequently in the movies at Warner’s featuring the Dead End Kids they always featured Billy Halop most prominently. But I always found Billy Halop the least interesting and most one-note of the fellas. If they mixed it up a bit, it would have been better, but they never did. It was always practically Billy Halop and the Dead End Kids. So eventually their contract ran out at Warner’s, which pretty much coincided with the studio pulling back on making gangster films. So now the boys were free agents. So they split up and created two separate groups. The Little Tough Guys, led by Billy Halop, who signed with Universal. And the East Side Kids, led by Leo Gorcey, who signed with Monogram Pictures. But Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, and Gabe Dell appeared in both groups. And considering how many movies they did, I’m not really sure how they accomplished it. Especially considering Universal didn’t just put the Little Tough Guys in features, but starred them in four serials as well. Now back in their Warner Bros. days they starred in some of the biggest movies on the lot with the studio’s biggest stars. This was definitely not the case with Monogram and Universal. The movies they made for them were hour-long B programmers. But this was back when studios knew how to make B programmers. So yeah, they were cheaper, but they were still pretty fucking good. And now the boys didn’t have to share the screen. The movies were about them. They were made by some of the best B movie directors in town, Wallace Fox, William Nigh, Ray Taylor, and Ford Beebe. And in the case of the East Side Kids many entries by the great Joseph H. Lewis. And two Little Tough Guy films were made by none other than German emigre Joe May (director of the German classic Asphalt and Fritz Lang’s mentor). And by the time Halop was starring in the Little Tough Guy movies, I liked him much better (especially in Joe May’s You’re Not So Tough, which is a dynamite little picture).

But for me, it’s all about Leo Gorcey and the East Side Kids. Gorcey was a bulldog-looking, hot-tempered little guy who strangled the English language with “dees,” “dems,”, and “does.” Also, despite his size, he could knock anybody’s block off. And he was a tremendous Smart Alec and Wise Guy (both the names of two of his movies). When Robert Blake became a superstar in the seventies due to his cop show Baretta, he was sorta the second coming of Leo Gorcey. In the movies Gorcey played Ethelbert “Muggs” McGinnis, the ringleader of the East Side Kids, which consisted of cute Bobby Jordan as Danny (who wore practically the same striped T-shirt in every film and kind of resembled a young Keanu Reeves), Huntz Hall’s Glimpy, who was the genuinely amusing comic foil to Gorcey’s straight man, former Little Rascal Sunshine Sammy Morrison as Scruno, the one black member of the gang, and usually Gabe Dell as the gang member most susceptible to corruption (if the local gangsters were going to get their hooks in one of the boys, it was always Gabe Dell), and then a couple of other guys who spent the movie hanging around but didn’t have names, or lines, except maybe a random, “You tell ’em, Muggs!”

As a young man in the late seventies, when all my on-screen role models were tough ethnic New York street guys (Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone, John Travolta, Robert Blake, Richard Gere), Leo Gorcey was the forebearer. He had the size and sass of Cagney, he looked a bit like John Garfield if somebody dropped an anvil on Garfield’s head from the top of the Empire State Building. And no doubt he could beat the shit out of Bogart. And as film series go, few other series lasted as long, did as many entries, and kept up as consistent a level of quality as Monogram’s East Side Kids films. The series definitely had some standout entries, but my two favorites were Joseph H. Lewis’ That Gang of Mine, which features a thoroughbred racing plot, an off-beat story, an out of character turn by Gorcey, and a highly dignified performance by black thespian Clarence Muse.* Muse and Morrison share a scene and a dolly shot that is not only unlike any other scene in the series, it’s unlike any other scene in a white Hollywood film of its era. It wouldn’t be until the sixties that another black actor was the focus of a dolly shot.

My other favorite is also one of my favorite boxing pictures, and my two favorite performances by both Gorcey and Jordan, Wallace Fox’s Bowery Blitzkrieg. It’s also the film that most resembles Stallone’s Paradise Alley, or at least the type of picture Paradise Alley is trying to be. Due to its public domain status, Bowery Blitzkrieg has been available for decades on shitty quality video tapes. But every video tape I’ve ever seen of the film (and believe me, I’ve looked), doesn’t include the scene that made me fall in love with the picture when I saw it as a kid on Channel 9. Just before Gorcey’s Muggs has to get to the boxing arena and fight the big climactic fight, he gives a pint of blood to save Jordan’s Danny, who’s lying in a hospital bed fighting for his life. The scene that’s always missing is a prayer/monologue to God, where Muggs begs the man upstairs to save his pal. It’s corny, it’s sentimental, and I’m tearing up just typing this.

And it could have been written by Stallone.

It was only towards the end of the film series run, when hacks like William Beaudine started wielding the megaphone, that the boys stopped being tough and started being goofy (the haunted house entry Ghosts on the Loose with Bela Lugosi and a young Ava Gardner is the pits).

Then Leo Gorcey got tired of working for producer Sam Katzman, quit the East Side Kids, started his own production company (where he’d own 40%), and started the Bowery Boys, originally called Leo Gorcey and His Bowery Boys.

And then the movies became terrible, but not right off the bat.

The first one, directed by Phil Karlson, isn’t bad. But pretty quickly the boys went from being tough guys to subpar Three Stooges–like buffoons.

The East Side Kids movies played like hour-long versions of the same types of movies that the boys used to make at Warner Bros. Boxing movies (Muggs becomes a boxer), racetrack movies (Muggs becomes a jockey), Muggs and the boys break up a ring of counterfeiters . . . etc., etc. . . .

But whatever realistic grit the East Side Kids movies had was lost when they started doing the stupid Bowery Boys movies. And Billy Halop had it worse. After the Little Tough Guys he went over to PRC Releasing company and with Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer started the Gas House Kids, which were to the Bowery Boys what the Ritz Brothers were to The Three Stooges. (Pauline Kael inexplicably always sang the praises of Harry Ritz and the Ritz Brothers. Well, whatever film on them that survived that was any good, I’ve never seen.)

Stallone has never acknowledged the East Side Kids as his inspiration for Paradise Alley. But when I saw the picture when it opened in 1978, when the East Side Kids played every Saturday morning on television, the debt was obvious.

Stallone’s film tells the story of the Carbonis, three Italian brothers (post-WW2), living in a garishly beautiful, Hollywood back-lot depiction of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen (one-half empty booze bottles—the other half fairy dust). Fast-buck con man Cosmo (Stallone, in the Gorcey part); mammoth-muscled ice block deliveryman, the sweet but simple-minded Vic (the extremely effective Lee Canalito in the Bobby Jordan role, if Jordan was the size of Steve Reeves); and burnt-out mortician with a war wound in his gimpy leg Lenny (Armand Assante in the susceptible to corruption Gabe Dell role).

The first act of the story follows Cosmo’s hairbrained schemes to make a buck in the neon lit slum streets of Hell’s Kitchen. Cosmo has a million ideas to make a million dollars, but he mistakes a big brain for a big mouth. Then he gets the idea to talk gentle giant Vic into entering the hundred dollar wrestling match that’s held at Paradise Alley—a local combination bar–wrestling arena.*

Vic ends up winning the match against the Paradise Alley champion Big Glory (John Milius regular Frank McRae). Then the fast buck opportunist Cosmo and sensitive older brother Lenny start managing Vic’s wrestling career. And the sweet Vic, now dubbed Kid Salami, turns into the Carboni brothers’ meal ticket as he continues to win matches and work his way up the ranks. But as Vic’s wrestling career does better and better, a personality change happens between the two managing brothers. Cosmo begins worrying more and more about Vic’s safety, and Lenny turns into a cold, callous fight promoter out of Body and Soul.

When Stallone first wrote the script—like Rocky—it was designed as a way to showcase himself in a real movie. So in his dream scenario it was supposed to star Robert De Niro as Cosmo, Al Pacino as Lenny, and himself as the beefy Vic. A hat trick he couldn’t quite pull off. But at one point it was almost made as an ABC TV movie. Stallone, his beautiful wife, Sasha, and that prehistoric beast of a dog he owned, Butkus (the one in Rocky), had just arrived in Los Angeles from New York. Their car broke down on Sunset Boulevard and Sly called the only person he knew in L.A., his costar from The Lords of Flatbush, Henry Winkler. So Winkler picks them up and drives them to a motel, Winkler remembering Butkus leaving three gallons of drool on his back seat. Winkler was riding high at the time on his TV show Happy Days, and his character Fonzie was just starting to take off. Henry asks Sly, what are his plans? Stallone shows him the script for what was then Hell’s Kitchen and says he wants to get it produced. Winkler reads it and really responds to the material. Knowing, due to the growing popularity of Fonzie, that he had a little pull over at ABC, Winkler asked Stallone permission to set it up as a TV movie. Stallone, excited by the prospect, said yes. Winkler goes to the network with the script and they agree to make it, with Winkler producing and starring as Cosmo, and Stallone playing the beefy, simple-minded wrestling brother, Vic.

Everybody’s all excited, till ABC decides the script needs a rewrite by somebody other than Stallone. A desperate, heartbroken Sylvester Stallone calls his friend and begs him to blow the deal so no Hollywood hack will fuck up his baby. And a disappointed Winkler cancels the film for a fellow Lord.

Actually, at the time, I’d have loved to see Henry Winkler (just once) lean into his black-leather-jacket-wearing persona. All of his non-Fonzie character choices swung wildly in the other direction. And his playing Cosmo Carboni would have given him the opportunity to have done that. But, despite his best efforts, Stallone could never get his wrestling script off the ground. So he put it away and started writing another script for himself to star in.

This time, instead of playing a wrestler, he’d play a boxer.

And the rest is history.

In a blatant act of highway robbery, two producers who had optioned Stallone’s Paradise Alley script for a penny—because Stallone was starving—John F. Roach and Ronald A. Suppa of Force Ten Productions, sued UA, Chartoff and Winkler, and Stallone, claiming the script for Rocky was the same as Paradise Alley. Well, any film critic could tell you that’s not the case. But since Paradise Alley was even closer to Stallone’s heart than Rocky, the newly christened movie star told Roach and Suppa no problem, I totally intend to make Paradise Alley. Except now, he’d be sitting for the first time in the director’s chair and playing Cosmo, the role he really wanted all along.

When Rocky came out, it became practically my favorite movie of all time. I’m aware I’ve said that a few times now. But that was the seventies. I was a young enthusiastic movie geek, during a time when movies were fucking incredible. But unless you were there in 1976, it’s pretty hard to get across the impact that the film Rocky had on audiences.

Everything about Rocky took audiences by complete surprise. The unknown guy in the lead, how emotional the film ended up being, that incredibly stirring score by Bill Conti, and one of the most dynamic climaxes most of us had ever experienced in a cinema.

I’d been to movies before where something happened on screen and the audience cheered. But never—and I repeat—never—like they cheered when Rocky landed that blow in the first round that knocked Apollo Creed to the floor. The entire theatre had been watching the fight with their hearts choking their throats, expecting the worst. Every blow Rocky took seemed to land on you. The smugness of Apollo Creed’s superiority over this ham and egg bum seemed like a repudiation of Rocky’s humanity. A humanity that both Stallone and the movie had spent the last ninety minutes making us fall in love with. Then suddenly—with one powerful swing—Apollo Creed was knocked to the floor on his back. I saw that film around seven or so times at the theatres, and every single time during that moment the audience practically hit the ceiling. But no time was like that first time. In 1976 I didn’t need to be told how involving movies could be. I knew. In fact I didn’t know much else. But until then, I had never been as emotionally invested in a lead character as I was with Rocky Balboa and by extension his creator Sylvester Stallone. Now that type of audience innocence would be practically impossible to duplicate for somebody just discovering the movie today. One, they’d have to contend with Stallone’s subsequent celebrity and career. And I don’t say that as a dig or a snarky comment. But the Planet Hollywood Stallone is not the Stallone who sat on Dinah Shore’s couch spinning witty stories about his hungry years.

You can’t pretend we don’t live in a world with eight movies featuring the character of Rocky, and five movies featuring Stallone’s other franchise character Rambo, sit on the shelves of long-ago boarded up video stores alongside cassettes for Cobra and Over the Top. But the real reason that the film Rocky could never have the impact it did in 1976 is because to have that same impact, you had to live through the tough, gritty, downbeat, pessimistic films of the early seventies to be floored by the feel-good catharsis of Rocky. You had to live in a world where a movie like Papillon was a Hollywood blockbuster.

When even crowd-pleasing comedies like The Longest Yard included the brutal death of characters.

In a Hollywood that had forsaken the Old Hollywood happy ending as bullshit propaganda from “the Man”.

When the senseless death of your hero at the climax was the vogue (Easy Rider, The New Centurions, Electra Glide in Blue, Hustle). When even popular audience movies like Three Days of the Condor counted on a certain amount of cynicism and paranoia from the popcorn eaters.

The closest thing to a feel-good movie in the early seventies was revenge films.

The closest I came to an audience cheering like we did in Rocky was George Kennedy and William Devane blowing the fuck out of the killers that murdered their families in The “Human” Factor and Rolling Thunder. I remember, before seeing Stallone’s film, being at some neighborhood kid’s house and the TV spot for Rocky came on. The kid wondered out loud, “What’s that?” And his mother glanced at the TV screen and said dismissively, “Oh, just another movie about some guy and his problems.” Today it’s very easy to romanticize that cynical seventies era—especially since it’s long gone—seemingly never to return. But from 1970 to at least 1977, every other movie that came out did seem like it was about “some guy and his problems.” Part of the elation tied to the audience’s response to the climactic fight in Rocky was after five years of seventies cinema, we didn’t really expect things to work out for Balboa. And I don’t mean we didn’t expect him to win the heavyweight championship of the world. He was never going to fucking win! We just hoped he didn’t look like a fucking joke. That’s why the ending was so surprisingly moving and cathartic. That’s why when he knocked Apollo Creed flat on his back we hit the roof. Because from that point on, no matter whatever else happened, Rocky proved he wasn’t a joke. But by the time you get to the last round—and Rocky has Apollo Creed on the ropes—hitting him with a left and a right and a left and a right and the crowd in the boxing arena was chanting; “Roc-ky . . . Roc-ky. . . .” Oh my fucking god!

There had simply never been anything like it.

Then at the Academy Awards the film duplicates its miraculous win in real life? From that point on cynicism in seventies cinema was dead on arrival.

Needless to say, as a young boy at that time, I LOVED SYLVESTER STALLONE. I loved everything about him. I loved Rocky, I loved him in Rocky, I loved his story about how he wrote Rocky (easily the most inspirational Hollywood story I had ever heard). I loved the way he looked, the way he sounded. I loved his witty and forthright interviews in magazines. He did all the talk shows of the day, numerous times, and was incredibly charming.

Mike Douglas shot an entire episode of his show from the set of F.I.S.T.

On Dinah! he sang the theme song to Paradise Alley!

So to say I was rooting for Stallone to prove himself more than a “Sylvester-come-lately” (as Los Angeles Magazine called him), would be an understatement.

His follow-up movie after Rocky was a bland epic about the teamsters, where he played a fictional version of Jimmy Hoffa, titled F.I.S.T., directed by Hollywood heavyweight Norman Jewison (as Roger Avary declares him, “The greatest Canadian filmmaker to ever live!”). The film wants to be to the trucking union what The Godfather was to the Mafia. What it plays like is a truncated seventies television miniseries. In fact, there was a television miniseries made to rip-off F.I.S.T. called Power that featured Joe Don Baker playing another fictionalized Jimmy Hoffa character. Now Stallone didn’t embarrass himself in F.I.S.T., but neither did he rise to the occasion of headlining a Hollywood epic. Not that I can imagine anybody else necessarily doing a better job with that movie and that script.

The scenes at the beginning when he flirts with Melinda Dillon, who eventually becomes the character’s wife, which Stallone wrote (it’s fucking obvious), are the only moments when the witty sparkle of Stallone on talk shows reveals itself (even Pauline Kael, who liked Stallone in Rocky, then dedicated herself to his mockery for the rest of her writing career, mentioned this about F.I.S.T. in her savage takedown of Paradise Alley).

All these years later, the only thing memorable about F.I.S.T. is when Stallone’s playing the older Hoffa (i.e., Johnny Kovac) how much he looks like the supposedly older Rock Hudson in Giant.

For his Rocky follow-up, there were three offers on the table, the Norman Jewison epic, Jon Voight’s Academy Award–winning role in Coming Home (don’t judge Sly too harshly for turning that down, by all accounts the script of that film was dreadful), and the title role in Walter Hill’s Melville-like car chase masterpiece, The Driver. Which is definitely a better movie than F.I.S.T., but not necessarily a better fit for Sylvester. It was Stallone’s personality that made him a star, the point of The Driver is the character hasn’t any personality. An aspect that the film’s lead, Ryan O’Neal, conveyed superbly. So Stallone’s real follow-up to Rocky would be his directorial debut of his original passion project, Paradise Alley.

Now as you can have guessed, judging from my enthusiasm for all things Sylvester Stallone at that time, I loved Paradise Alley! Who knows how many times I saw it in the cinemas when it came out. I also read the very entertaining novelization written by Stallone himself, and later bought the film on video back when MCA home video cassettes were crazy expensive. I even had the Paradise Alley poster up on my bedroom wall for a while. Not to mention I owned the soundtrack (which was a really good soundtrack album and it introduced me to Tom Waits). I loved it so much one of the first scripts I ever tried writing was a straight-up rip-off of Stallone’s epic titled Brooklyn B.R. (don’t ask what B.R. stood for, like Reservoir Dogs, it didn’t mean anything, it just sounded good).

It followed the adventures of three Italian brothers in thirties Brooklyn named the De Vito Brothers (no relation to Danny). Dominick, Scotty, and Dario (like Stallone, I wrote it to play Dominick—the Cosmo one). I never finished that script, but since I ripped off the entire story from Mr. Stallone, that was the screenplay I got furthest along than any other, before eventually abandoning it.

But if you were a Paradise Alley fan, the most important thing wasn’t liking it, it was defending it against all comers. And when it came to defending Paradise Alley, I dare say I did a damn sight better job than Stallone. My biggest claim was, “Paradise Alley was one of the greatest directorial debuts of the seventies! And the greatest actor-director directorial debuts [along with Orson Welles] of all time!” Fuck John Cassavetes, fuck Charles Laughton, fuck Charlie Chaplin, it’s Paradise fucking Alley!

Okay, but how do I feel about it now?

Well, maybe it isn’t “one of the greatest directorial debuts of all time!” But it is a very good debut of a filmmaker with both obvious talent and vision (dare I say Stallone is the best director Sylvester has ever worked with). And in its own way, it’s the purest expression of the particular vision that the actor had back in those days. In a way the relative reality of Rocky somewhat hemmed in Stallone’s movie-movie hot house vision. What Stallone replaces it with in Rocky was finding a personal equivalent in his own life to the screenplay he was writing. The way Rocky Balboa was a “ham and egger” (the movie’s parlance) club fighter, is how Stallone thought of himself as an actor (though Stallone was far more successful an actor before Rocky than he presented himself afterwards). And Rocky’s shot at the heavyweight title mirrors exactly Stallone’s shot of headlining a United Artist studio motion picture produced by the super producer team of Chartoff and Winkler. This personal expression, filtered through the life of Rocky, would become a hallmark of the series and the writer’s best work.

Stallone’s best movie as a director-writer-actor was Rocky II (I even prefer it to the first one). In the sequel, Rocky’s triumphant contest with Apollo Creed is at first celebrated, but then eventually discounted as a fluke. His achievement is dismissed by sportswriters, sports fans, and the general public at large as not talent, not skill, but luck. And by mid-movie he’s pretty much written off as a flash in the pan (“Sylvester-Come-Lately”). Even his rematch with Apollo Creed is dubbed by the sports community as a desperate attempt to both cash in and remain relevant, just like the announcement in the trades that Stallone was making Rocky II. One of the things that makes Rocky II extremely powerful is the lead character’s money worries. At the end of the day, he accepts the rematch because he fucking needs the cash.

And yet again, life imitated art. The way Rocky’s rematch with Apollo Creed redeemed the fighter to the world, Stallone’s sequel, after the failure of F.I.S.T. and Paradise Alley, redeemed Sylvester.

As an actor, haters could still speculate out loud whether or not Stallone was able to play anything but a dim-witted boxer. But he did prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the movie-going audience’s affection for the character of Rocky Balboa was no fluke. People loved the character in the second movie even more than the first film (the humiliation he suffers in the middle section of the picture is truly hard to watch). And Stallone proved he could direct a good movie. If you liked the movie Rocky, you probably think the first movie is better. But if you loved the character of Rocky, you definitely think the second movie is best.

But the reason, beyond just its effectiveness, that I feel Rocky II is superior to the first film is an added layer of depth and perspective that the writer brought to the fairy tale. This time out, Stallone isn’t identifying with just Rocky Balboa. This time, Stallone is also Apollo Creed.

Rocky made Sylvester Stallone one of the biggest celebrities in the world. And Sylvester Stallone, like many before him, soon realized all that glitters isn’t gold.

Rocky is wounded by all the slings and arrows thrown his way by the media.

Apollo Creed, on the other hand, is spitting mad.

Carl Weathers spends the entire movie fucking furious at his perception in the media. Creed stomping around his giant house—angrily reading hate mail—probably mirrors Stallone stomping around his giant house reading Pauline Kael’s review of Paradise Alley.

In the press, Stallone went from “aww shucks” nice guy to challenging movie reviewers to fights (“I’d like to see him say that to my face!”). He had the money, he had the fame, he had the house, he had the wardrobe, he had the cars. But putting pen to paper on the manuscript for Rocky II, he knew something he never could have known when he wrote the first movie. To possess those things there’s a price to be paid. And yeah, people can say, fuck you—no biggie. I’m sure that’s what Stallone would have said before Rocky. But those are people who have never and will never pay that price.

And Stallone didn’t handle it well.

And neither does Apollo Creed.

In fact one of the most remarkable things about Rocky II is despite all the fucked up shit that Apollo Creed does in the film, we never really hate him. Because we understand he’s in pain and he’s not himself. He’s a howling giant screaming at the moon for shining.

We don’t hate him.

We feel sorry for him and wait for him to come to his senses.

Well, Paradise Alley isn’t as good as either Rocky or Rocky II, but it’s unlikely Rocky II would be as good as it is without Stallone making Paradise Alley first. And it’s much better than either Rocky III or IV. Rocky and Rocky II are real movies. Rocky III and Rocky IV are single issue comic books, with Rocky fighting super villains in films that resemble trailers more than actual movies—like Superman vs. Muhammad Ali.

I know a lot of boys who came of age in the eighties love those movies. And I’m not saying they’re not effective—for what they are. It’s what they are that bugs me. To me, Rocky wasn’t a comic book. And his opponents weren’t villains who could have been created by Jack Kirby.

I always took Rocky too seriously to fully endorse the unreal direction that Stallone took the series. Messy though it is, Paradise Alley is a real movie.

It’s clear Stallone had a vision in his head for the picture, and he killed himself trying to get that vision out of his head, and up on the screen. It’s also clear it’s the work of a talented young writer in love with his own words and the milieu he’s creating at the expense of everything else. In fact this script goes to show how much Stallone learned about screenwriting by the time he penned Rocky. The script for Rocky works slow and precise, moving steadily forward towards its bring-the-house-down climax. But the structure that works so well in Rocky is completely absent from Paradise Alley. As opposed to the slow and steady build of the boxing movie, his script for the wrestling movie is all over the place. It invests time in strange subplots that don’t go anywhere. The film’s whole first act seems to center on Cosmo’s Herculean efforts to get his hands on an organ grinder’s monkey (“I could make a fortune with that monkey”). Which admittedly leads to the film’s best sequence, an arm wrestling match between Vic and the local wrestling champion Frankie the Thumper (Terry Funk), who looks like a living breathing Chester Gould creation (he out-gargoyles Robert Tessier in Walter Hill’s Hard Times).

It’s the film’s best scene, and the scene that proves beyond a doubt that Stallone is a director. Cosmo gets the monkey, but his money-making plans go bust. But then, we never see or hear from the monkey again. What the fuck happened to it? Did the Carbonis eat it?

Other intriguing subplots are brought up yet frustratingly never elaborated on. Like sweet Vic’s relationship with Susan, a Chinese girl from the neighborhood played by the always adorable Aimee Eccles (from Pretty Maids All in a Row). And the film’s big dramatic character shift, when crass Cosmo and sensible Lenny switch personalities, isn’t earned dramatically. They just all of a sudden switch personalities like they’ve been struck by some Freaky Friday–like curse. And while the final wrestling match between Vic and Frankie the Thumper is cinematic as all get out—a storm breaks out on fight night, leaking water into the fleapit joint that collects in a big puddle in the middle of the ring—it’s never dramatic because Vic’s victorious outcome seems preordained. Both Canalito and Funk do a great job and it’s choreographed well (as is a really powerful wrestling montage earlier in the film that’s cut to some terrific Bill Conti music), but because of the kind of movie it is, of course Vic’s going to win. True, the outcome of eighty-five percent of all sports movies are preordained. Nevertheless, there’s still usually some suspense. The final match in Paradise Alley is fun to watch with all the splashing water, but it provides zero suspense. The final boxing match in Rocky IV is more suspenseful, and that film’s one-sheet shows Rocky in the ring, post-fight, wrapped in an American flag, with his gloves raised high in the air in a victory pose. Today it may be hard to remember, but in the first film Rocky’s victory was not a foregone conclusion. And sure enough—he didn’t win. But it was excruciatingly suspenseful and emotionally wrenching. The reason it affected audiences so potently was the way the film, slowly, despite Rocky’s punchiness, made you take him seriously. More serious than any other on-screen character, including Adrian. Rocky isn’t just underestimated, he’s a joke. And any serious ambitions on his part is the punch line. In the first film, Rocky Balboa wasn’t about winning the heavyweight title from Apollo Creed, he was about proving he deserved to even put the gloves on in the first place.

Nothing that deep happens in Paradise Alley. It’s all surface. But with cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs providing the eye-popping cinematic sizzle, what a surface (I’ve watched it on TV with the color turned off in black and white and it looks even better).

This film is Stallone’s vision and aesthetic, unfiltered, undiluted, and delivered full bore in your face. Sly’s good ear for writing funny dialogue, his collection of larger than life Damon Runyon type characters (especially his rogues’ gallery of villains), his Irish-like face-on-the-barroom-floor sentimentality, the film’s mean streets milieu and its stylized poetic flourishes set against fire escapes and garbage cans, all amount to a passionate artist’s vision, who if he doesn’t really have anything to say, for sure has something to express. Without that limiting, demanding structure that Rocky forced him to adhere to, Stallone can do everything he always wanted to do.

Racing across tenement rooftops (with fellow Lord Paul Mace), a big tear-jerking death scene for over the hill black wrestler Big Glory (Frank McRae, who should have been nominated for an Oscar), Big Vic who, like a Hell’s Kitchen Steve Reeves, carries huge blocks of ice up floor after floor of tenement stairs, Stallone performing one whole section of the movie in a Santa Claus suit, the final wrestling match with the sweaty behemoths splashing in the water.

And his cast is great. You can tell they all enjoyed wearing the costumes and spouting Sly’s witty lines. And as the three Carboni brothers, Stallone, Canalito, and Assante are terrific.

Especially Canalito, who plays his cliched part with a poignant depth the other two don’t quite match.*

Assante is cast as sort of a poor man’s Pacino, and since this movie the actor enjoyed a twenty-five year career as . . . well . . . a poor man’s Pacino.

And Stallone—who’s never looked better in any film than in Alley—plays Cosmo as a one-note obnoxious loudmouth.

But he’s an obnoxious loudmouth with really funny lines. Colorful smart-ass dialogue he frustratingly couldn’t put in the mouth of dim-witted Rocky, he spouts nonstop as Cosmo. And until he gets all soft and mushy at the end, I think he’s a fucking scream. But I think the whole movie is a scream. Is it messy? Yeah of course. But above all Paradise Alley is funny.

Because of its genre and setting, its cast of pros, its passionate vision fulfillment, and its actor/director architecture, as Myron Meisel pointed out in the LA Reader, the film’s reminiscent of another ego epic, Jack Webb’s Pete Kelly’s Blues.

And I would say, as well as Eddie Murphy’s much maligned in the white press—but beloved in the hood—gangster fantasia, Harlem Nights.

Stallone, Webb, and Murphy share similar visions and similar passions behind those visions. As well as similar targets on their foreheads.

It would be amazing to see Stallone direct another movie with the passion he had when he made Paradise Alley. It would be amazing to see Stallone love something again the way he loved Paradise Alley.*