In 1977, the same year Rocky went on to win the Oscar for best picture, Sylvester Stallone was presenting the best supporting actress prize. Before he announced the contenders, his co-presenter crept up behind him. “I’m the real Apollo Creed!” Muhammad Ali told him. “You stole my script!”
The pair sparred, laughing, to applause from the audience. But Ali had a point. Rocky’s black opponent in the original film was shamelessly inspired by the boxer – and it’s a far from flattering comparison. In Rocky, Apollo (played by Carl Weathers) is smug, cynical and money-obsessed. One critic called it the “portrayal of blacks as displacers of whites, allies of power and authority, and strong but soulless”.
In this, the film was simply of its time. A final caucasian victory is celebrated right through the history of boxing on film. Watch Raging Bull, The Champ, Cinderella Man, The Fighter and Southpaw and you could reasonably conclude that this was a sport dominated by white men.
Creed, which sees Rocky, retired from the ring, coach Apollo’s estranged son, Adonis, helps redress this – and some of the uneasy racial politics of the original films. Both the lead role (Michael B Jordan) and the love interest (Tessa Thompson) are African American; the director, Ryan Coogler, and his co-writer, Aaron Covington, too.
“There is a movement going on right now,” says Coogler. “We are inheriting the world from the boomer generation in the same way as Adonis is inheriting the world from Rocky, and we are trying to find our place in the world.” Coogler, whose Sundance-winning drama Fruitvale Station was based on the shooting of a young black man by a white cop – and also starred Jordan – has reinvigorated the franchise through the frame of race.
He melds the classic Rocky tropes – the seemingly unbeatable opponent, the harsh training regime, the climactic showdown – with a subtle and serious exploration of the impact of absent fatherhood on black masculinity. Adonis’s journey from denying his father to accepting and forgiving him is the journey of a boy becoming a man. Just as the earlier Rocky films reflected the politics and culture of their time, Creed is a film of its time; a film made in the era of Black Lives Matter.
For Coogler, still not yet 30, the original series was one he watched at home with his father. “I was born in 1986,” he says, “and Rocky was always around. Rocky was like Star Wars for the underdog, like Star Wars for the street.”
Yet the franchise with which Rocky shares most overlap is James Bond. The first Rocky was released three months ahead of The Spy Who Loved Me, and Balboa has all the credentials to be seen as the American 007.
Both epitomise values felt endemic to their native countries. Where Bond is sophisticated, unflappable and sardonically witty, Rocky is sentimental and unkempt yet full of heart. With Creed, Coogler has done for Rocky what Sam Mendes achieved with Skyfall: rebooted the franchise by stripping back the myth to reveal the human drama at its heart. Says Coogler: “Balboa, like Bond in Skyfall, is struggling with his own mortality and with age. The one thing that people are afraid of as they get older is losing friends and the relationships that define you. That is where we see Rocky at.”
Both Bond and Rocky are committed patriots, prepared to fight for their country. Both also project the unreconstructed gender assumptions of a bygone age, albeit deployed differently. Back in the 70s, Stallone complained about the apparent dearth of “real men to go around”. But while Bond girls are impossibly glamorous, Rocky’s squeeze, Adrian, is a chronically shy, spectacle-wearing pet-shop assistant, seduced by his appalling jokes. Rocky’s masculinity, unlike Bond’s, is not tinged with misogyny. Inside the ring, he is – necessarily – brutal; outside, he’s a gent.
Yet while Bond has been played by a revolving door cast of dapper actors, Rocky is inseparable from the man who created him, and much of the allure of the series has been in charting their parallel fortunes. In the first film, Stallone and Rocky were both outsiders; in later films, both the actor and the character had to wrestle with the challenges of great success; the films became glossier (as did Stallone’s body on the poster of Rocky III). In the early films, Rocky was fighting fellow boxers, but in Creed, his battle is with a far more fearsome opponent: mortality (he is suffering from cancer).
“My inspiration for this film was my relationship with my dad,” says Coogler. “My father was Rocky in real life. He was so strong and I associated his masculinity with physical things. But then he got sick and I realised that this is not what makes you a man; it’s what is on the inside. With Rocky it is the same thing.”
When Rocky won that Oscar, nearly 40 years ago, it beat Network and Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men. It was also up against the third Dirty Harry film, which opened in the US the same month. But Balboa was no Travis Bickle and he wasn’t a Harry Callaghan. He was an uncomplicatedly good man who believed in holding on to hope. “I want to be remembered as a man of raging optimism,” said Stallone at the time, “who believes in the American dream. Right now, it’s as if a big cavernous black hole has been burned into the entertainment section of the brain. It’s filled with demons and paranoia and fear. Where are all the heroes?”
Creed gives us a new breed of hero. While Rocky’s opening shot was of Jesus Christ, on a poster, looking down on a dimly lit boxing ring, Creed’s is of a juvenile detention centre following a brutal fight. The euphoric sentimentality has been replaced with an engagement in modern reality that pulls no punches. The spectre of salvation seems a distant memory.
Creed is released in the UK on 15 January
