Beginning in the early 1930s, the film examines the rise to
power in the Federation of InterState Truckers of Johnny
Kovak, a humble organizer who becomes the President of the
union. Beginning with his early politicization after being
fired for trying to make a deal for his colleagues, we trace
Kovak through his struggles to sign up reluctant truckers,
his increasing skills as a demagogue, his clumsy romance
with Anna, and his first major strike which results in the
death of a close colleague. At first, Kovak is merely
concerned with the awesomely powerful companies such as
Consolidated Trucking but he gradually comes to realize that
political corruption isn’t limited to the bosses but has
also infiltrated the union.
For the first hour or so, F.I.S.T. is riveting
melodrama, concentrating on the fight between the union and
Consolidated Trucking and featuring a strong performance
from Stallone. His screen presence makes him very convincing
as the kind of guy who could persuade others to join a
righteous cause. The confrontations between strikers and
company thugs are vivid and exciting, pulling no punches in
displaying the willing brutality of both sides. There are
also some unexpectedly delightful scenes between Stallone
and Melinda Dillon, full of touching understatement and a
fine sense of social comedy, especially in a priceless scene
where he is stuck talking to her mother and obeys, to the
letter, an instruction to talk about nothing except the
weather. Flavor is added by a strong visual sense of blue
collar America – somewhat romanticized but beautifully
elegaic thanks to the superb DP Laszlo Kovacs’ – and
strengthened by a fine supporting cast, notably Peter Boyle
as the rabidly anti-Bolshevist first president of the union
Max Graham.
But once the strike is settled, something very odd happens.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, the film loses its
grip. This is odd because nothing seems to change at first.
There’s a brief but potent confrontation between Stallone
and Brian Dennehy, as a reluctant local leader, and good
moments from Kevin Conway and Tony Lo Bianco as seemingly
sympathetic mobsters. But you can feel the focus slipping
away as the film tries to deal with too much. In its
impeccably liberal standpoint – the unions and companies
both share similar faults and grow to resemble each other –
the film is very typical of Norman Jewison’s work in general
and he begins to broaden the scope of the narrative while
keeping to this balanced viewpoint. This limits the film,
dealing with too many people and events but never finding a
point of commitment to anything being balanced and the
increasingly elusive character of Kovak. This is shown
particularly cruelly in Stallone’s performance. It’s not
that his work here is bad; indeed, it’s extremely good and
hard working. But he’s not a strong enough actor to embody
the number of inner contradictions that Kovak is required to
convey and he eventually resorts to grandstanding displays
of shameless ham. This isn’t disgraceful and much better
actors than Stallone have done the same thing – Al Pacino
has built half his career on doing it – but it does nothing
for the film. By the middle of the second hour you simply
don’t care anymore, either about the story or the character.
At the time of release, the film came under fire for its
romanticized fictionalization of the Teamsters Union, which
F.I.S.T. is quite obviously based upon, but that’s a red
herring. Such hagiography would actually make it more
interesting because it could then be propaganda and have
more dramatic teeth. But in fact, Jewison’s aforementioned
determination to be fair to all sides has no room for such
affiliation. Indeed, the second half of the film, set in
1960 and featuring a greyed-up Stallone and David Huffman,
as his best friend Abe, needs something to bring some fire
to the confrontations between Kovak and Andrew Madison – a
crusading senator played by a surprisingly muted Rod Steiger.
Kovak’s eminent reasonableness and Madison’s lack of either
threat or sympathy simply adds up to a bland confection
which barely holds the attention. The climax of the film
seems as much a compromised attempt to tie up narrative
threads as the dramatic conclusion it’s meant to be. Bill
Conti’s unsuitable music oozes like syrup over the final
images.
This ultimate blandness can also be blamed on the script.
The story should be a vital, riveting document of how unions
became a great power in an inherently capitalist system but
that process isn’t just made vague, it’s completely omitted.
The time jump between the 1930s and 1960s means that Kovak
becomes a political force without us knowing how or why,
except that it’s some kind of shadowy deal involving the
mob. An attempt is made to contrast Kovak with Abe – Kovak
as a mob-linked politico, Abe as a committed union man – but
the time shift blurs this and the relationship between the
men is never made as clear as it should be. When they meet
again in 1960, they greet each other like brothers but it’s
not explained whether they’ve seen each other in the
intervening years. I have nothing against a film which
expects the audience to use its collective brain but I do
object to this kind of lazy ellipsis. The unavoidable
impression is that the film was edited down into two and a
quarter hours from a much longer original. On the credit
side, some of the dialogue is excellent, with the ethnic
color that Stallone brought to Rocky. But the dead
hand of Joe Eszterhaus, so familiar to us from his use of
the same femme/homme fatale plot he used in at least five
films, is all too evident. The second half of the film plods
along, desperately trying to remind us of the Pacino scenes
from The Godfather Part Two but lacking Puzo and
Coppola’s devious narrative ploys and their sense of
character.
Still, the subject itself is interesting enough to make
F.I.S.T. worth seeing. It’s impossible to even
contemplate such a film being made by a major studio and
with a major star today. Perhaps only the late 1970s, when
post-Watergate cynicism led to an unusual rash of films with
political topics, could have produced it. It’s a shame it
lacks any real commitment or dramatic excitement but the
vividness of the first half is praiseworthy. Norma Rae
is a much more successful look at union politics, possibly
because it is unambiguously on the side of its heroine and
because it’s content to deal with a big subject on a small
scale. But the ambitious scale of F.I.S.T. makes it,
in Hollywood terms, a one-off.
