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In his vanilla suit and matching boots, he moved with the assurance of an athlete whose daily regimen includes whole-grain bread, no sugar, a two-hour workout and 45 daily vitamins. At 5 ft. 10 in. and 165 Ibs., Stallone appears slighter in person than he does on the screen. But on the slender legs of a runner resides the torso of Charles Atlas. His face is healthily gaunt: rosy but hollow cheeks guard the languid brown eyes. When the yellow cloth fell from the 8½-ft, $70,000 movie-prop bronze statue, Stallone gazed upon his features on the face of a fiction. That confrontation has taken place before. Rocky has made the star wealthy ($25 million from the first two installments), a leading man the equal of an Eastwood or a Reynolds, and a budding Hollywood business force. But his image as the boxer has kept Stallone's career in a clinch. His other roles, the labor leader in F.I.S.T. or the neighborhood loafer in Paradise Alley, attracted disappointing revenues and mixed reviews. After a moment, he turned to his fans, raising his fists and becoming Rocky for an instant, as if he were slipping into another skin. "You can break that statue into a million pieces, and you'd find a piece of it in every Philadelphian," he cried. "It belongs to you."
Rocky III is a kind of report to the fans on Stallone's recent life. The film's dramatic motor is the struggle from the softness of success back to the mental toughness of a champ. If Stallone is a man of steel, he is scarcely a man of irony, and he handles Rocky III as he has handled all of his writing and directing efforts, with heart-in-the-right-place primitivism. That is not necessarily a defect in movies that depend for effectiveness on walloping blows to the audience's emotional solar plexus. Stallone is unabashedly faithful to his character and his friends. The old gang is reassembled. Talia Shire is freshly steadfast and inspirational as Rocky's wife Adrian, Burgess Meredith is back as the wizened trainer Mickey and Burt Young as the earthy brother-in-law Paulie. Carl Weathers reprises his wily Apollo Creed. It is all durable and somehow innocent. There are no crooked managers, no manipulating promoters, no mobsters in this boxing crowd.
This time Rocky, who whipped Creed to take the title in II, announces his retirement, feeling he can no longer give the sport his best shot. From the crowd on the museum steps jumps the Mohawk-coiffed, feather-bedecked Clubber Lang (played by Newcomer Mr. T, a.k.a. Lawrence Tero). The top contender harangues the champ with an intensity from somewhere beyond Muhammad Ali, demanding a title shot. Mickey, who has coached Rocky's career from the beginning, tells the fighter the awful truth: his title defenses have been against opponents he could easily whip. Lang, he suggests, would be too much to handle. "The worst thing that can happen to any fighter happened to you. You got civilized." The champion picks up the challenge, but when Mickey dies of a heart attack, Rocky loses the "eye of the tiger"—his term for hungry resolve—and the bout.