F.I.S.T.

In Cleveland the warehouse worker Johnny Kovak starts organising against conditions and rises through the Federation of Inter-State Truckers. To strengthen the union he makes a deal with the mob. As the years pass the power he gains takes him away from the man he started as, and he ends up facing a Senate investigation. Norman Jewison directed. Sylvester Stallone plays Johnny Kovak. Joe Eszterhas wrote the screenplay. The project came out of journalism. The producer Gene Corman approached Eszterhas after reading his investigative writing on unions. Eszterhas conducted long interviews with workers across the Midwest; a forty-page treatment grew to five hundred pages. Stallone signed before Rocky opened, and although he became a major star in the meantime he kept his verbal commitment. He contributed to the script himself, particularly the dialogue and the scenes he shared with Melinda Dillon. Audiences identified the story with Jimmy Hoffa and the filmmakers denied it. Eszterhas gave his reason: that is unfair to the memory of Hoffa, because Johnny Kovak kills a man in the film and makes a deal with the mob, and Hoffa never did that. Against an 8 million dollar budget it took 20.3 million domestically. The reviews split sharply; Rotten Tomatoes sits at 67 percent and Metacritic at 54. Supporters praised its grit, its photography and Stallone's restrained dramatic work; detractors found it formulaic, uneven and self-indulgent, with a narrative that collapses in the middle and none of Rocky's sincerity. Who it is for: viewers who like union history and large-scale American drama of the seventies. Who it is not for: anyone who tires of two-and-a-half-hour rise-and-fall stories. The film slows noticeably in its second half.