Rocky review – 50 years on, Stallone’s boxer remains an exhilaratingly gritty contender

The actor’s triumphant breakthrough has clear ancestors in grimy tales of working-class struggle, but finds a fresh, rousing idealism

Peter Farrelly’s new film I Play Rocky is about the underdog-with-heart story of how a great boxing movie got made against the odds with its plucky young untried screenwriter allowed to star. So here is a reissue of that 1976 film for its 50th anniversary. It’s a forthright, rousingly idealistic film, wholesome in its essential patriotism, and which unselfconsciously shrugs off the boxing-movie’s gloomy generic inheritance, throwing away its grim traditional baggage of tragedy, cynicism and loss. It also doubles as a love letter to Philadelphia, the cradle of American democracy.