Sylvester Stallone turns 80: The American dream wears boxer shorts

Every year, over four million tourists make a pilgrimage to the bronze Rocky statue at the foot of the famous stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which Sylvester Stallone climbed in a sweaty tracksuit in his 1976 American rising star story “Rocky”. His triumphant gesture at the top of the 72 steps, turning in a circle with his arms raised in front of the morning silhouette of the city, made film history.

In 1982, the statue in the victory pose, which was made for the third “Rocky” film, was ceremoniously inaugurated above the stairs. The original is now in the museum. The flesh-and-blood original, which celebrates its 80th birthday on Monday, began its own museumization as an action hero (in the “Expendables” films, his “Action Hero Hall of Fame”) a good 15 years ago.

As Rocky, he fought his way into the hearts of the audience

The simple, but still heartfelt, outsider fable about the young boxer Rocky Balboa, who, after hard training on sides of beef in the slaughterhouse and in the chicken coop, is given the unlikely opportunity to fight for the world title, moved the audience so much because the heart and soul that the leading actor and screenwriter had invested was noticeable in every scene. Actually, Sylvester Stallone, born in 1946 into an Italian working-class family in the raucous New York neighborhood of “Hell’s Kitchen” and growing up with an irascible father, would have been predestined for the role of a gangster.

With his mumbled, slightly slurring speech and his drooping eyelids, the result of a complication at birth, the agencies rejected him in droves at the end of the 1960s. So he sat down at night and filled his notebooks with scripts in which he was the star. “The guy who saves a bus full of kids,” as he told it in the Netflix documentary “Sly” two years ago. He also earned money with supporting roles; The soft porn film “Kitty & Studs” from 1970 is still notorious today.

15 or 16 scripts were created this way. The story about the boxer Rocky Balboa ultimately aroused the interest of producer Irwin Winkler, who, however, had a different star in mind than the rather uncharismatic Stallone. However, he didn’t want to sell “his” story for any money in the world. Winkler had to reluctantly give in. In 1977, “Rocky” won the Oscar for best film – against, among others, “Taxi Driver” by Martin Scorsese, whose “Mean Streets” Stallone had served as a model.

Every shining heroic figure was a symbolic parricide

The gesture of celebration, immortalized in bronze, has gone down in American memory, especially in the USA’s anniversary year, as a pop culture motif of the “American Dream”. For Stallone, as he later repeatedly said in interviews, the success with (and as) “Rocky” was also a personal triumph over his father’s rejection.

The career as an indomitable fighting machine that Stallone had developed in Hollywood with the “Rocky” and “Rambo” films was already predetermined in this biographical character. In 1978, he responded to the devastating reviews for his directorial debut “Vorhof zum Paradies” with defiance – and the first “Rocky” sequel. Every shining heroic figure (Stallone persuaded the studio that the traumatized Vietnam veteran John Rambo survives at the end of the first film) amounted to symbolic patricide. Frank Senior and Sylvester only reconciled on their deathbed.

But of course, the 1980s were the perfect decade for the excess that Stallone’s increasingly cartoonish persona embodied during those years. The turbulent marriage with the Danish model Brigitte Nielsen. The duel with Arnold Schwarzenegger for the crown of the most box-office star of the decade. From film to film they outdid each other in terms of muscle mass, firearm sizes and record salaries. The absurd highlight was Stallone’s arm-wrestling trucker Lincoln Hawk in the wrestling film “Over the Top” by Israeli wannabe Coppola Menahem Golan.

Stallone defeated the evil Russians twice in the cinema

The film represents the tragedy of the middle phase of Sylvester Stallone’s career, who in the end has no choice but to do what the audience wants to see him do. Twice in the foothills of the Cold War, on behalf of his compatriots, he spanked the evil Russians: in 1985 in the ring against doping monster Ivan Drago in “Rocky 4,” and two years later with a bazooka alongside the Taliban against the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan. He finally became an American icon at the height of the Reagan years.

In interviews, Stallone has repeatedly expressed regret that he did not have the courage, like his “Expendables” partner Bruce Willis, to take on roles in small, independent films. Among other things, Quentin Tarantino, who filmed “Pulp Fiction” with Willis, is a big Stallone fan.

But all attempts to break out of his role profile failed. The first time was in the early 1990s with the comedies “Oscar – From the Rain to the Eaves” and “Stop! Or My Mommy Will Shoot!”. And then again towards the end of the decade in the underrated police drama Copland, in which he appeared in front of the camera with Scorsese icons Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Ray Liotta.

Afterwards, Stallone had accepted that his success could only lie in continuing to cultivate his brand. Not only was he the first action star to write his own scripts and be his own director. Stallone has also created three successful franchises with the “Rocky”, “Rambo” and “Expendables” films. In 2015, he also resumed the “Rocky” series with Michael B. Jordan in the role of his friend Appollo Creed’s son, which has since spawned two sequels. In the series “Tulsa King” he plays a mafia boss in exile with an amused self-deprecation that was not expected of him for a long time.

Of course, there is no need to have any illusions about the politics of the action heroes of the 1980s. Anyone who wanted to save America in the cinema back then was a supporter of Ronald Reagan. Today, the conservative worldview is no longer quite so black and white. Politically, Sylvester Stallone is more in the camp of the late colleague and NRA member Chuck Norris, not in that of his Trump-critical friend Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He recently compared the incumbent president to George Washington. For this, he received a Medal of Honor for his life’s work last year at the now renamed Trump Kennedy Center. So it can be said that Sylvester Stallone has not yet lost his feeling for his fans.