Going Broadway 02.15.12: Wrestling Movie Review: Paradise Alley

I can remember the first time I saw Paradise Alley. I had a cheap bag of Red Man chew, a twelve pack of Yuengling, and a hoagie: a collegiate value meal. For years, this movie eluded me. Blockbuster nor any self respecting video rental enterprise would touch this Sylvester Stallone gem. In fact, when asked, a Blockbuster employee stated from the vantage point of his computer that the film was “in moratorium.” (?) I guess that was the polite way of saying, “no chance in hell, get stuffed!”

Anyhow, that became the glory of Netflix. They have loads of terrible crap on DVD that no one else outside of a bootlegger’s table at a flea market would have. (We clamored once for the arrival of Corey Haim’s gem Silver Bullet.) Thank you, Netflix. You finally delivered me Paradise Alley. You became my Boba Fett, you cunning bastard.

This mock epic was finally at an end. It wasn’t worth Alexander Pope’s shittiest effort, but it was a damn fine ending to a Friday spent being pretentious on a stage. That little red envelope. That’s all that stood between me and the elusive Stallone-wrestling movie. It hit me in that moment that there was a considerable possibility that this could be a big bag of shit, and my expectations would take the kind of Macho Man elbow drop that collapsed Charles Robinson’s lung.

Let’s ask the Ultimate Warrior:

Stallone gets right into it with the first scene. Exposition is for pansies. He wants you to see him as Cosmo Carboni racing some guy even shorter than Stallone in a roof top race for a measly five dollars. But it’s not that measly, as Stallone points out with the opening text on screen announcing it’s 1946. Oh, by the way, Stallone is directing this beast by way. Directing, starring, and-

-The race begins, shifting into slow motion, emphasizing the look of determination on Stallone’s face as if he wants to remind us he is the best runner in movie history. But what happens next is so unexpected, it’s almost surreal. Like you had taken Salvia while listening to the Gorillaz and saw nothing but grotesque deformity in the room and wanted to leap nine stories to your death. A song begins to play, but that’s not where it begins to get weird. It’s the voice…

No… It can’t be… Holy shit, it is! It’s Stallone singing or “singing” the title song. I kid you not. Was Frank Stallone on a smoke or something? Is is this a joke?

This would only begin the pattern of self indulgence Stallone would stamp on the film.

After the opening credits mercifully end, we catch up with Cosmo conning as a veteran on hard times with a tin cup in hand in Hell’s Kitchen. He eventually gets picked up by his hulking brother Victor played by Lee Canalito, who looks like to the 50’s era Marlon Brando from On The Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire. Even his cadence is Brando’s. But he plays the gentle kind of giant, not quite Of Mice And Men kind of simple but close. He hold affection for a bird named Bella and studiously works through the dictionary to understand words with his Asian girlfriend, Susan. By day he drives an ice truck and hauls the giant blocks up stairs, but never “loses his breakfast” doing it, as Cosmo loves to point out.

We soon meet the third brother in the triumvirate of Paradise Alley, Lenny, played by a debuting Armand Assante. He is the quiet, reserved brother of the three, like Al Pacino in his early years where he didn’t scream but a couple times a movie and talked barely above a whisper. (Pacino was, in fact, Stallone’s first choice to play the part.) It’s fitting for him considering he’s the undertaker of the slums and has a gimping war injury that forces him to walk with a cane. The family dynamic forces Lenny to be simultaneously the brother who keeps Cosmo grounded in his exuberance and Victor’s spirits uplifted in his daily grind.

Canalito and Assante take the reserved “less is more approach” to their work. Not Stallone as Cosmo. Not at all. He directs himself so over the top (stupid pun), it’s nearly painful to watch. And believe me, I’ve put up with bad Stallone. A lot of bad of Stallone. We all have. He can be funny, but he’s not funny at all in this. You’re just hoping for an action montage or a cut to someone else to get the camera off him.

The driving force of the movie is the relationship between the brothers and their desire to get out of the slums of Hell’s Kitchen and off to better lives. Stallone gives you plenty of sequences to show this. The scenes in Mahon’s Bar are right out of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” lyrics. Even Frank Stallone as the lounge singer looks on like the Joel character himself. His look of contempt is probably genuine because of his benching from the title song by his older brother (asshole).

Also hovering around the scene is Annie played by Anne Archer, the love interest of both Cosmo and Lenny (who actually is her former flame). She’s basically Pat Benatar from the “Love Is A Battlefield” music video, a dime-a-dance girl ready to shoulder thrust at her dickhead pimp when he steps out of line. But she sculpts behind closed doors, dreaming of something more herself.

The other key entrance in this scene is from Stich (Kevin Conway) and his goons, an Irish gang that walks around with Kangol’s turned backwards. The enforcer of this gang is none other than Terry Funk, who looks in his 70’s era prime with his short hair and bulked up frame. He’s got that crazy look in his eye that looks like he’s got bad constipation. He practically cuts a promo throughout each piece of dialogue he throws out. Within moments, he and Victor are sizing up one another. This showdown is inevitable, and funny enough they lock horns early on… in an arm wrestling match… for a monkey… Yes, Cosmo makes a bet that if Victor wins, he gets Stich’s monkey (with the intention of trying to make money off him on street). Amazing.

It’s not until forty minutes into the movie that we finally get our taste of the squared circle. Cosmo and Lenny happen upon another bar called Paradise Alley, where they watch a wrestler named Big Glory (Frank McRae) dispensing of challenger after challenger who thinks they can last a round with him in the ring. This leads to another ingenious plan by Cosmo: turn Victor into a professional wrestler so they can make big money. Lenny objects, looking out for Victor’s best interests, but Cosmo ultimately convinces Victor to join in. Victor ends up going Batista on Glory with heavy shoulder thrusts in the turnbuckle that knock the big man out. Victor wins a hundred dollars for his efforts, but he’s still reluctant to embrace wrestling full-time as Cosmo wants him to.

There’s actually a really good bit to this. Despite being, once again, completely self indulgent with the way he directs this movie, Stallone has a scene with Victor making the grueling trek up a long flight of steps with another large block of ice. It’s one of many call backs to Rocky. Stallone’s run up the steps in the downtown Philadelphia area is symbolic of his drive to succeed. It’s an iconic moment of achievement. Victor’s walk up these stairs with ice is represents a guy commented to the grind. He doesn’t drop the ice, and he doesn’t stop for a break. He keeps going all the way to the top. But what happens when he gets there? His customer declines the block. They have an ice maker now. A dejected Victor finally shows his frustration and chucks the ice down the stairs. The grind he has been content with for years will not be enough to get him and Susan the houseboat they want in New Jersey.

So, finally, we’re into the wrestling of the movie. Cosmo acts as trainer for Victor and Lenny his manager. Victor is rechristened as “Kid Salami” in the ring, complete with entrance attire which includes a sausage poncho. He convincingly wins his first match, and then we get a montage of the run of victories he goes on.

Now, if there’s anything Stallone can nail as a director, it’s a montage. Fast forward to Rocky IV and you’ll get no less than four in the movie. But they’re what everyone’s waiting to see. The great thing with the Paradise Alley montage is the contribution of Terry Funk to the movie. Credited as the Wrestling Choreographer of the picture, Funk gets a great assist from other cameos in this montage such as Ted Dibiase, Gene Kiniski, Dory Funk Jr, and Dick Murdoch (to name a few). It’s a great showcase of classic professional wrestling in terms of executing and working a match. Granted, it’s dramatized even further than it already is because it’s a movie (and sometimes seems more like a hybrid of boxing and wrestling) but it makes some of the more painful acting situations more tolerable.

Of course, everyone can see what’s coming. Victor’s success leads to Cosmo and Lenny swapping attitudes with Lenny being the one consumed with the profit of Victor’s career and Cosmo concerned for the long term health of his younger brother.

The other point of strife between Cosmo and Lenny is the continued struggle for the affections of Annie. Cosmo’s scenes with her are badly written screwball comedy dialogue of the worst kind. He harangues her with lines like “Everybody needs something. And I think what YOU need is a whole lotta ME, wrapped around you on a cold winter night.” No wonder she doesn’t want Cosmo. But the bigger reason is her prior relationship with Lenny which apparently ended when Lenny came back from World War II with his leg injury and felt too embarrassed to be her guy. Once that confession is out of the way, and Annie reassures him of otherwise, they get back together. Cosmo is appalled by this and sulks throughout a portion of the movie despite the fact that Annie never showed him any affection, not to mention the glaring fact that she’s the girl his brother is obviously still in love with(Another nice asshole move by Stallone. Your brother goes off to fight in the war, and you want to steal his girl. Prick.)

Have to pause here in the middle of the hysteria to point out that this was also the film debut of Tom Waits who has a couple of scenes as a piano player named Mumbles. Not to be confused with Dustin Hoffman’s character in Dick Tracy.

The final wrestling match is the inevitable confrontation between Frankie “The Thumper” (Terry Funk) and Victor with the high stakes all of his saved earnings accumulated throughout his forty plus fights on the line. One last fight, and he and Susan can finally go to New Jersey to start their life together. I love Frankie’s entrance robe, a Christmas present from boss Stitch that has “kill” written all over it. Perfect wardrobe for Funk. And to further raise the stakes and heighten the drama, Stallone puts the final fight on the night of a monsoon in the city. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t mean much as Paradise Alley is a bar. But somehow or another, the roof has become damaged and it is pouring down rain in the ring… only the ring.

This thing goes 22 “rounds,” which isn’t really determined by clock or anything. They just periodically go to their corners for a quick breather. (There’s also no referee in the ring throughout any of these matches as well.) Point is, it is a long damn match. And when I say these guys go at it, they go at it. Probably one of the more underrated final fights in the genre of action movies. We even get the Rocky-esque fight montage where we just see slow motion after slow motion cut and dissolve of suplexes, arm drag take downs, and some of the grizzliest looking dropkicks I’ve ever seen. The finish of the fight gets a little muddled, though. Frankie executes a sunset flip from the outside and appears to have Victor covered for a three count which gives him the win. But immediately following, he starts stomping Victor out which causes the ring announcer to disqualify him. But then Stitch and gang hit the ring and threaten the ring announcer, which causes him to annul his reversal. So we’re back to Frankie being the winner.

All three brothers are confronted by the gang in the ring to pay up the nine thousand they fronted, but instead of paying, Cosmo, Lenny, and Victor throw all of them out of the ring, and stand united at the end. The family’s back together. Freeze frame final shot, queue Stallone on the mic for the theme song again.

Honestly, it’s not a terrible movie. The biggest problem, if you haven’t been able to tell by now, is Stallone. The fact is, after the whirlwind success of Rocky, Stallone was thinking his shit was smelling mighty rosy and wanted to demonstrate his auteur skills now as a director. I’m sure we all would be full of ourselves after a promotional campaign such as this TV spot for Rocky.

You can tell in some ways he was trying to escape the Rocky character he had created and show he had range, but at the same time took pretty much the same framework, same ideals, same score, just changed the location and the sport of the movie.

Supposedly he had written the script before Rocky with African American characters instead but couldn’t get the funding from the studios without himself in the starring role. Thus, the characters were changed to Italian American. There might be credibility to this if Stallone didn’t try to make himself the center of every scene Cosmo is in, which is almost all of them.

As clunky and convoluted as Stallone makes the direction of the picture, there are a few redeeming moments such as Victor’s climb up the stairs with the ice. The one that steals the movie is the Christmas Eve scene with Glory and Cosmo on the dock after a drunken joy ride throughout the streets in Victor’s ice truck. After Glory loses to Victor, his career is pretty much over. He’s a bigger, less eloquent version of Apollo Creed, but McRae’s range is honestly larger than Carl Weathers’ when it comes to scene work. Having lived in a rat infested room under Paradise Alley with no money to show for his career in the ring, Glory is a depressed loner until Cosmo befriends him and takes him out for Christmas. He tells Cosmo at the docks that he’s happy for the first time in a long time, and then proceeds to state that it is the perfect time to kill himself. Cosmo thinks it’s a joke at first because they’re having such a good time, but Glory reiterates that when he’s sad he doesn’t think about suicide. He only thinks about hurting other people in the ring. Glory figures that killing himself when he’s happy is the best way to go because he can go out on top. Stallone injects some humor into the scene by having Glory jump from the dock but landing onto a platform of produce below. But it’s only a set back. Glory eventually takes the plunge into the river.

I’d hate to give Stallone so much credit for foreshadowing, but the other part of Glory’s speech has to do with how wrestling ruined him physically and emotionally, and that Victor needs to get out of it before it kills him too. It’s not too heavy handed. It’s actually very poignant and summed up in his line “In a hundred years, none of this will matter.” Frank McRae isn’t master thespian over here, but every time the guy shows up (and most of the time it’s as a police chief), he brings the goods. That’s one guy you’d want to have a beer with.

I revisited Paradise Alley this week because I was trying to find its place in the wrestling movie pantheon. (I was a big fan of finding the U.K. version of the DVD cover, posted above, which still makes the movie appear to be a lost Rocky sequel so many years later.) Was it as bad as I remembered it? No, not as bad, and it’s certainly not the worst wrestling movie ever made. My recommendation to view it is purely based on what the supporting cast brings to the table. For Stallone, this was his second commercial failure after Rocky, which meant one inevitable conclusion: he would have to do Rocky II. Although he would write, act, and direct again, it’s a much better effort than Paradise Alley. You can tell he learned his lesson, though, at least for a years: he would leave himself off of the soundtrack… at least until Rhinestone.