PARADISE ALLEY marked Sylvester Stallone’s directorial debut a year before Rocky II and two years after that first Rocky. Stallone will never return to the Olympus of the best directors, yet he is someone who has his own personal vision, an advocate of direct cinema without too many frills, in those years an exponent of a poor, proletarian approach, which gives his cinema a sincere edge and to which one becomes attached very easily.
Analyzing the protagonist of “Paradise Alley”, played by Stallone himself, we find several traits in common with the famous Rocky Balboa: the moments of Cosmo’s courtship in which he tries to capture Annie’s attention and sympathies are very reminiscent Balboa’s insistent approaches in an attempt to conquer Adriana, the jokes, the insistence, the fact of playing a lot on sympathy. Then there is sport, here with an even more street origin than in Rocky (we are in the very first post-war period where more or less clandestine wrestling matches are the order of the day), there is the poor neighborhood of origin New York and there are family ties, the similarities between the two films are different, even the source material comes from Stallone himself, who the year before the film’s release managed to publish the novel of the same name, in the original language “Paradise Alley”.
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