Have you ever wanted to hug a mountain? That’s how I feel when I see Sylvester Stallone climbing one. Frozen, breathless, crooked face contorted, body bulging in a wet, grey T-shirt — those peaks of muscles, those valleys of organs, those streams of blood vessels — plastered against the Dolomites, before the camera pulls back to show the vast plane of granite as, bit by bit, he himself becomes part of the canyon (in fact, a seamless digital blend of painting and climbing wall). In her review of Cliffhanger, the 1993 action-adventure thriller in which this scene appears, Janet Maslin describes Stallone as “a smaller, more mobile and no less impressive piece of scenery”. And he knows it. More than any of his hard-bodied contemporaries — Arnold “Austrian Oak” Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude “Muscles from Brussels” Van Damme, Dolph “Grace Jones’s Bodyguard” Lundgren — Stallone shaped his physique through the 1980s and ’90s not as a weapon (or not merely) but an extension of the environment around him. “He always had this supreme consciousness of how a body looked on film,” says Chris Holmlund, editor of The Ultimate Stallone Reader.
For Cliffhanger, Stallone trained hard to build his climbing muscles. The results are so spectacular that, when he posed nude on the cover of Vanity Fair as Rodin’s “Thinker” the year of its release (under the headline: “Sly’s Body of Art”), you could have mistaken him for the real thing.
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