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It Was a Pleasure Just to Watch Carl Weathers Move

The actor’s wattage was so bright it practically burned a hole in the screen. It’s why he left the Rocky franchise as its star.

Pushing against the downbeat trends of American cinema in the ‘70s, and channeling white ethnic anxiety after the civil rights movement (Apollo started out as a reactionary caricature of Muhammad Ali, losing the lived experience of racism but keeping the mouthiness), Rocky became a global megahit that let Stallone write, direct, produce and star in many more films and franchises. But the tragedy of the Apollo’s exit — martyred at the hands of glowering Soviet boxer Ivan Drago (Lundgren) in a Cold War perversion of Joe Louis’ matchup with German champ Max Schmeling — was thrilling in a more primordial way, like a comic book answer to Shakespeare or the Greeks. Weathers’ most powerful reactive closeup in the series comes near the end of the fight in Rocky IV, when his wife cries out from the stands, realizing that her husband is overmatched, and Apollo stares back at her helplessly, a prisoner of his neediness and machismo.

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