On September 27, 2013, A.V. Club posted, Sly Stallone’s Paradise Alley is Like Nothing Else he Ever Made by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky. Here’s a taste…
Sylvester Stallone’s directorial debut, Paradise Alley, is a prototypical vanity project: a wrestling-themed period piece set in 1940s New York that opens with Stallone warbling a maudlin piano ballad over the credits. However, unlike Stallone’s subsequent directorial efforts—all but two of them Rocky or Rambo movies—it wasn’t produced to satisfy franchise fans or meet genre expectations; when Paradise Alleywas greenlit, Stallone was considered a bankable Oscar-nominated screenwriter and actor, rather than a bankable action star.