Rocky at an All-Night Screening: A Film Lover’s Golden Age, from Oita to Jimbocho | My Golden Age of Cinema #1

Born in 1961, I began watching films seriously after entering high school in Oita City in April 1977, and in the years between moving to Tokyo for university in April 1980 and graduating in March 1986 (I took a few detours and side roads along the way…), I watched more films than at any other time in my life. At my peak I saw more than 500 films a year. This was an era before streaming or DVDs, when even videotapes had not yet caught on, and the only place to see a film was a movie theater or the like.

In those nine years, Western cinema gave us popular series that continue to this day, such as Star Wars and Alien, along with many blockbusters, much-talked-about hits and masterpieces. In Japanese cinema, classics were released such as The Man Who Stole the Sun and The Family Game, both ranked near the top of Kinema Junpo’s “All-Time Best” list (selected in 2009), as well as The Yellow Handkerchief and Kagemusha. As for theaters, every neighborhood had its own meigaza (repertory cinema), each competing with unique retrospectives (there were theaters as wonderful as the Jimbocho Theater all over Tokyo!), all-night screenings were popular, and there was a rich variety of venues, from gigantic movie palaces (not multiplexes) to mini theaters. After moving to Tokyo, my daily routine was to hop from theater to theater with a copy of the listings magazine Pia or City Road in hand, and in between, to dig through the used bookstores of Jimbocho for back issues of Kinema Junpo and film programs. Looking back now, I believe those nine years were my own “golden age of cinema.”

In this column, I would like to write about films from this “personal golden age of cinema,” including my own memories of them. I suspect many book lovers are also film lovers, so I hope you will join me. For the first installment: Rocky (released in Japan in April 1977). It was the breakthrough film of the then completely unknown Sylvester Stallone, and it went on to become a series; counting the spin-off Creed films, all nine installments were big hits. It was acclaimed by critics as well, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture among other honors, and in Japan it was named No. 1 in Kinema Junpo’s annual Best Ten.

After starting high school, I lived in a student dormitory, and I saw Rocky with a dorm friend at the first all-night screening of my life (back then, many first-run theaters held all-night screenings on Saturdays; high school students getting in was, admittedly, a problem…). We had planned to go home after one viewing, but we were both so moved and so excited that we watched it again and again until morning. In the early hours, feverish and convinced we had become Rocky, the two of us sprinted all the way back to the dorm through the slowly brightening streets, humming that theme song. It was truly ridiculous, but that is how strong an impact the film had.

At its core is the story of a down-and-out Italian-American boxer who rallies himself to take on the champion, along with the beauty of his pure love for his girlfriend Adrian, the sheer energy of scenes such as his run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and above all, that exhilarating music! Later the dorm supervisor found out I had gone to an all-night screening and gave me a thorough scolding, which I now remember fondly. Stallone went on to rise all the way to Hollywood superstardom, but both his body and his views grew ever more macho, and now he has even come to praise President Trump as “a second George Washington.” Oh dear…

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日本語で読む — Read this article in Japanese