He recognized that Rocky""s main ability was to take a lot of punches and punishment, without any boxing finesse: "You got heart, but you fight like a god-damn ape...The film opened in the year 1902 with the arrival of he lone title character under grayish rainy skies and across a wooded, wintry wilderness landscape, with evidence of environmental destruction from logging and deforestation...prey to passing prowlers, poverty and policemen...with only ten cents in his pocket...John Lloyd Sullivan, the Calef of Comedy departed Hollywood at four o""clock this morning."In a classic farcical, slapstick, briskly sped-up, cross-country chase scene, after he is picked up by a thirteen-year-old hot-rodder (Robert Winkler) who is wearing a crash helmet and is "studyin"" o be a whippet tanker.He witnesses, first as a voyeur, a sexually-depraved, blackmailing relationship between a monstrous, loathsome, nitrous-oxide sniffing kidnapper (Dennis Hopper) and an abused/brutalized mother and fragile nightclub singer (Isabella Rossellini).