Norman Jewison's F.I.S.T. isn't likely the first movie to come to mind when discussing the work of the director or of a top-billed Sylvester Stallone but it's nevertheless a solid slice of late seventies filmmaking done on a modest budget. It's also a film whose topics still matter to a vast amount of people in America and beyond and while we can stop short of calling this a message picture, it does tell a story of importance.

A period film set in the 1930's, F.I.S.T. opens in Cleveland where we meet Stallone as a laborer named Johnny Kovak. He works hard at his job but along with his co-workers is mistreated by those in charge. If anything breaks in a box he moves, it comes out of his paycheck. If work needs to be done once quitting time comes, the guys are forced to work overtime and don't even think about getting paid extra for doing it. In short, they're exploited, but with the economy being what it is, the men are afraid to stand up for themselves for fear of being canned and replaced. There are plenty of job hungry guys out there equally capable of doing the work that Johnny and the rest of the crew do.

Things change when Johnny meets a truck driver named Mike Monaghan (Richard Herd). He's part of a union and maybe not so surprisingly, he inspires Johnny and his pal Abe Belkin (David Huffman) to start getting organized an sure enough they do just that. Before you know it, Kovak is the man in charge of a new union called the Federated-Interstate-Trucks (F.I.S.T. for short, naturally) and as he charismatically convinces his cohorts to strike, he finds himself playing on a national stage. Given that the story follows some rather Hoffa-esque trappings, soon enough Kovak is dealing with corruption, cheating and dishonesty and not always in the right way and eventually he finds himself on the bad side of a Senate Committee investigation led by a less than sympathetic Senator Madison (Rod Steiger).

The first screenplay to be made from the writing of Joe Eszterhas (who hit box office gold in the eighties with movies like Flashdance and into the nineties with Basic Instinct before being permanently associated with the beautiful disaster that is 1995's Showgirls), F.I.S.T. may not offer a whole lot of surprises in terms of where its story goes but it does provide some genuinely impressive performances. Stallone is very good in the film. Comparisons to Rocky are perhaps inevitable, as both characters buck the odds, but once they do Kovak and Balboa go in decidedly different directions. Stallone shows good range here, creating a believable and interesting man and as such, we want to see where he goes with all of this. We do wind up with some shortcomings in terms of his character's depth. This is no fault of Stallone's, he didn't write the picture, but a bit more emphasis on the ‘how and why' of Kovak's character arc would have made for a more satisfying narrative. We don't get as much of that as we need and instead it sometimes just feels like Eszterhas is writing an unofficial Hoffa bio-pic.

Steiger as his foil is also strong here. He plays his Senator with such conviction and determination that it's hard not to appreciate the work that the actor obviously put into this role. We get solid supporting efforts from the lovely Melinda Dillon as Stallone's love interest and from Tony Lobianco, while Herd and Huffman turn in good work here too. Peter Boyle and Kevin Conway both show up here in small but memorable parts as well.

Jewison's film, which is quite epic in that it spans a few decades (and features decent enough makeup work to pull this off) shows nice attention to period detail. The first part of the film does feel like it's taking place in the 1930's rather than a recreation thereof (to the best of this writer's knowledge, at any rate) and it really does come to life when things turn violent. The film is not an action movie but those riot scenes carry a wallop and where the movie comes in short in areas of depth and in really getting into the nitty-gritty of the corruption aspect of its storyline, it delivers plenty of entertainment in its place. At two-hours and twenty-five minutes, F.I.S.T. does feel a bit longer than it needs to be but despite some quirks and obvious flaws the good definitely outweighs the bad here, particularly for Stallone fans who appreciate seeing the action hero's more serious, dramatic side.

Video:

F.I.S.T. arrives on Blu-ray framed at 1.78.1 in AVC encoded 1080p high definition in a transfer that generally looks very good. There is plenty of obvious film grain here but only very minor print damage ever rears its hard. Colors are nicely reproduced and black levels stay pretty strong and deep here. There aren't any obvious compression artifacts to quibble over nor are there any obvious instances of edge enhancement or noise reduction. This is a pretty nice film-like transfer that offers the expected upgrade in detail, texture and clarity over the past DVD release.