Revisiting 'First Blood'

Movies starring Sylvester Stallone seem easy to pigeonhole at first glance. Plenty of slam-bang action with lots of shootings and explosions, very little dialogue, stereotypical characters, American jingoism, male machismo - these are the staple ingredients of a typical Stallone film, especially those released in his 1980s and early 1990s heydays. But there remains a little gem of a film that had all these elements, yet which managed to rise above its limitations. The name of that movie is First Blood (1982, directed by Ted Kotcheff), the first instalment in the hugely lucrative John Rambo franchise.

When the movie fan thinks of Rambo, the image that immediately comes to mind is that of an over-muscled and highly-trained physical specimen who bursts into explosive rage at an imagined or real slight and lays waste to whatever he can with as much military firepower as he can muster. Yet, in First Blood, when we first meet him, Rambo is at his quietest and most vulnerable. He is not looking to pick a fight with anyone. But he certainly objects to being pushed around and run out of the small town he visits - how can a war hero and Green Beret submit to a bully of a local police chief like that, without a whimper? It's just not likely.

Few people know that Rambo was first born in the pages of a debut novel by David Morrell, a Canadian-American writer. The novel was published in 1972 with the Vietnam War as the backdrop for the main character's motivations and it was made into a movie, also titled First Blood, a good 10 years later. The movie ending differed from the book's finale in one major way, which I will not disclose here. Suffice to say that if the novel's climax had been followed in the film treatment, we would not have seen three Rambo sequels. Again, that might have been a good thing as the latest Rambo film, released in 2008, was disastrously bad!

But it is First Blood we are concerned with, not its sequels. There is much to commend in this tight-as-a-drum, 97-minute chase movie. It starts quietly enough as a taciturn Rambo comes to the little town of Hope looking for a former Army colleague. He learns his friend is no longer alive. On his way out of town, Rambo runs into the local police chief (played superbly by Brian Dennehy in the role of his life) who takes an instant dislike to the long-haired stranger. Rambo is hauled off to the town police station where he suddenly runs amok (literally) after some rough handling by the cops sets off bad memories from his time in the Vietnam War.

The movie changes gear at this point and there follows an exhilarating series of superb set-piece action sequences when Rambo flees into the woods and the full might of the state machinery is turned against him. These scenes are still stunning to watch, even after so many years. Rambo goes into full guerrilla battle mode and he turns hunter quickly, attacking the hapless cops who do not know what they are dealing with. There is one stunning encounter where Rambo sets booby-traps and literally melts into the undergrowth in between attacking his pursuers. Another memorable scene is when he jumps from a cliff into a mass of trees to escape the helicopter that is attacking him.

Finally the cops realise that who they are dealing with. The National Guard is called in to deal with the menace. The only man who can actually control this one-man army - Rambo's former training officer and mentor, Col Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna, in his most famous role) - makes an appearance at this stage. Rambo at this point is completely berserk and he goes after the police chief himself following a series of attacks on the town. It is at this stage that the book and film treatment part company.

Rambo in First Blood is not the cartoonish superhero he would become in the sequels. This is just a disturbed war veteran who fights back after being unjustly pushed around. In the subsequent Rambo films, the canvas becomes much bigger. Rambo fights the evils of the Cold War era, even taking on the might of the entire Soviet Army in the third film in the franchise.

While all the Rambo films are exciting to watch for action buffs, it is First Blood that is the most believable and the most satisfying (at least for me). Another interesting thing is that despite all the violence on screen, there is very little blood and gore in any of the scenes. The movie is also beautifully shot - the encounter scenes in the mountains are visually beautiful, for instance, and intensely claustrophorbic, which is perfectly suited for the overall theme.

Though Stallone is a gifted script-writer (another fact that many people hardly know of), the late scene in First Blood where he rambles on is probably the weakest one in the whole film. Dialogue delivery has never been Stallone's strongest point and, to this day, I have never really understood what his character says in this supposedly key scene. Rambo's raw appeal works best when he just grunts and mumbles and gets on with his business of mayhem and destruction.

In the part of India I grew up in, there are some superheroes that are always popular, especially among men - Bruce Lee's martial-arts personas and Stallone's Rambo reign supreme there even many decades after they first burst on the screen. Their appeal never seems to fade even when they have become a joke to the more sophisticated cinema audiences in the wider world. Is this because because we remember a much more simpler world through these rough-hewn characters? There was not much CGI then and so the action we saw on screen was usually performed by actual people (usually the stunt doubles) - there was a gritty realism to these movies that is sorely lacking in the current action films.

The influence of First Blood was huge and yet we hardly remember this movie now as a trend-setter of the genre. It was not a commercial blockbuster, unlike its first two sequels, though critical reviews were generally favourable. But First Blood deserves to be more widely watched and appreciated, especially now when special-effects have taken over much of the "action" in action movies.