First Blood Is The Deepest

Monday is movies. Today I talk about the first Rambo film, the best Rambo film. 40 Years Old. I celebrated by attending The Roxy's retro screening. This film still holds.

Last night I went to The Roxy for a 40th Anniversary screening of First Blood. I’m a big fan of The Roxy, and their retro screenings in particular. And I’ve been to a bunch of 40th Anniversary screenings over the last couple of years – noticing that, more often than not, the films really stand up. If anything, they seem to mean more now. But that’s what happens with rewatching films. Your own life experience adds to the situation, is a type of pixie-dust that sprinkles itself in on the rewatch process.

The Rambo Franchise is hammy, jingoistic and insulting – its legacy is cruel and dumb and somewhat pisses on the brilliance of the first film.

I’ve always felt that First Blood deserves to be best remembered as a standalone work.

I loved Rambo: First Blood Part II when I was a kid. Because I loved action films. And, even though the American patriotism was trowelled on too thick, I could still watch it as a conscious-free shoot-em-up because I had a privileged upbringing and was killing time watching a movie for escapism.

But when I went back to First Blood – watching it a bunch of times as a teenager – I couldn’t believe the brilliance of the film, in comparison. It’s taut and psychologically intense. It’s more a thriller/drama for most of its run-time. And when it does explode up into an action film with some rather over the top set pieces it acts more as paranoid anti-allegory; as the dark side of fantasy. It’s basically the movie Taxi Driver on a weird fast-forward.

First Blood was a novel (written in 1972) by David Morrell. (He would go on to write the novelisations of First Blood Part II and Rambo III but his First Blood is an original work).

The book is brilliant – and I’m gutted that I sold my copy in one of the big book culls. But I’ll find it again one day…

Stephen King taught the book in his creative writing classes, and I remember reading it and thinking it had some of the tone of King’s early “Richard Bachman” work.

John Rambo is a returned Vietnam war soldier; a Green Beret. He is a drifter, patriotism chewed him up and spat him out, he can’t find work, nor respect. He goes to visit one of the other survivors from his elite team only to find that Agent Orange-derived cancer has put an end to another life and that Rambo is the lone survivor from that squadron.

A cruel bully of a local police chief just doesn’t like Rambo’s kind and marshals him out of town. Then arrests him for vagrancy and manhandles him to the station where he’s picked on and mocked and in being processed he’s hosed down, beaten and further bullied. It brings back the Vietnam experience.

The novel and the movie tell a PTSD story. I’d always though this was the important theme that is just completely ignored for the Rambo sequels. They in fact make a mockery of this important building block.

But to watch the movie in 2022 and to see John Rambo’s brand of vigilantism is to think about how we can’t know what drives another person; we can’t generally know what has happened in their world and what it has turned them into.

Brian Dennehy and Sylvester Stallone are both brilliant in roles that were first reserved for other A-listers. Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall both turned down the chance to be Sherriff Will Teasle. And Clint Eastwood, Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino were among those first tapped for John Rambo.

John Rambo escapes from the prison before he’s put firmly in the cell. He grabs a motorbike and heads or the hills, Teasle tries to be like a dog with a bone and crashes his police car in pursuit. He orders a chopper to hunt him down, then a man with dogs. Next thing there’s a survivalist in the woods with state police, local volunteers and other armed forces, including – eventually – Colonel Sam Trautman, the man that recruited and trained Rambo, his father figure (played by Richard Crenna).

It’s a simple set up and we are all in and straight away. The action trimmed and pulled tight.

Jerry Goldsmith’s score is perfect. The supporting cast is decent (I spotted a young David Caruso this time, had never noticed him previously) but it’s really about the inner demons of Rambo and the pig-headed bullying of Dennehy’s sheriff – and what that represents. His protect and serve ethos chopped and screwed, twisted to suit his personal narrative, with never a thought towards whether Rambo was any sort of hero, only that he’s a threat.

People talk about the absurd climax of the film – explosions, flame throwers, and a syllable-gargling monologue from Sly where he fully outs his PTSD and cries-ugly over the horrors he was faced to endure.

But that just seemed somehow more plausible to me in 2022. So many of us are at breaking point daily. And it might be because of juggling jobs and family and COVID and the hostility we’ve curated in our own social media timeliness. It might be trivial for the most part. But it’s our waking horror. And there are breaking points. And the chewing gum stretch of it all feels real and pantomime all at once – and when something breaks up all the way into a meltdown it is so often absurd. And that’s the truly frightening aspect I think.

So I watched First Blood last night. For the first time in probably nearly 30 years. I can’t remember how long it’s been – but I doubt I’ve seen is since the mid-90s at the latest.

And I loved every second of it. A near perfect movie for me.

I thought again about how its legacy is corrupted by what followed; by the sick franchise that it created. If it was standalone it would be there alongside Taxi Driver (sharing similar themes, exploring them in different ways). But instead it’s sometimes written off as the film people never bothered to see, or mocked because it’s so easy to mock Sly’s slurring delivery.