Word: alleys
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...PARADISE ALLEY Directed and Written by Sylvester Stallone...
...movies after Rocky, Sylvester Stallone is down but not out. His new film is not the comeback picture that Stallone needs to recover fully from the debacle of F.I.S.T., but neither is it a complete fail ure. At times Paradise Alley looks like a catastrophe: it is often crudely made, badly acted and unwittingly ridiculous. Yet the film doesn't chase the audience out of the theater, as F.I.S.T. did. Just when the going gets roughest, this crazy movie springs into idiosyncratic, if fleeting life...
...exercise in egomania, Paradise Alley almost puts Barbra Streisand's A Star Is Born to shame. Besides starring in the film, Stallone wrote the script (from his own novel, no less), directed it and sings the theme song. The plot, far too structurally ambitious for a novice director, is a cynical attempt to cash in on every '40s movie cliche not used in Rocky and most of those that were. Set in 1946, the story tells of three downtrodden brothers who dream of breaking out of Manhattan's impoverished Hell's Kitchen: a lame World...
When dealing with bedrock matters of story and character, Paradise Alley is an utter mess. Stallone's two co-stars are blanks on the screen; their personal metamorphoses are too sketchily written and acted to have any impact. The men's love interests (Anne Archer, Joyce Ingalls, Aimee Eccles) are all crassly conceived stereotypes; there is even a hooker with a heart of gold. Whatever credibility exists in the screenplay is soon destroyed by Stallone's direction. Paradise Alley is a cinematic minefield of bizarre transitions, cryptic anecdotes, continuity lapses and mushy dissolves. Despite Laszlo Kovacs...
...Dylan, Bowling Alley Blues...