This Week In Retro: First Blood (1982) (Patreon)

October 22, 1982: John Rambo takes his first steps on a long road

by Diamond Feit

Fictional characters have a way of developing lives of their own. Whatever their inspirations, whatever their scripted beliefs or motivations, once they enter the wide world of pop culture, no one can predict how they'll be received or what meaning they will represent to a mass audience.

For example, let's play a game of word association. Are you ready? When I say the name "Rambo," what do you picture? Actor Sylvester Stallone probably, shirtless, sweaty, running through the jungle, carrying an arsenal of deadly weapons, wiping out entire divisions of heavily armed men? That's the image most people have of the now-famous character; an unstoppable soldier, a one-man army, a lone warrior willing to fight until he's the last person standing.

Yet John Rambo's story began very differently than where it ended up. Author David Morrell created Rambo in his 1972 novel First Blood, originally conceiving the character as a troubled veteran from the then-ongoing Vietnam War. As a Green Beret, Rambo excelled in combat, but as a civilian, he struggled to make ends meet. A chance encounter with a pushy small-town sheriff turned violent, pitting Rambo against the authorities and ultimately against his own commanding officer who arrives on the scene to intervene.

Morrell sold the film rights to First Blood before his book even hit store shelves, where it became a bestseller and received glowing reviews. The concept spent a decade bouncing around Hollywood, with the lead role being offered to stars like Robert DeNiro, Clint Eastwood, and Al Pacino. However, the project eventually took a turn thanks to the involvement of Sylvester Stallone, who would not only star in the film but revise the screenplay as well, and thus First Blood would premiere in theaters in October of 1982, launching Rambo into the forefront of American culture.

With a gentle yet soaring score from Jerry Goldsmith, First Blood opens with a shot of a dirt road and a lone man walking towards the camera. As he comes closer, we see him smiling, and the camera pans left to reveal a small house with a gorgeous lakeside view. He hasn't said anything yet, but already the audience can see this man is wearing an Army jacket and carrying a duffel bag under his arms. Wherever he is, we can tell that he walked a long way to get here and is elated to finally arrive.

Walking past children playing in the yard, the man immediately introduces himself as John Rambo to the lone adult of the house as she hangs the laundry. He fumbles for things in his pocket, apologetic, explaining that he's looking for an old buddy from the Vietnam War. "I sure had a hard time finding this place," he says with a small chuckle, laughing not because he's joking but because he just doesn't know what else to say to this taciturn woman who's giving him very few answers.

Eventually she tells him the bad news: His friend—and her son presumably—died over a year earlier. "Cancer. Brought it back from 'Nam," she says, as she tugs on the laundry cord with just enough urgency to betray her anger and frustration. Rambo is visibly devastated, not only because his old friend has died, but as we later learn, his only friend has died, making him the last survivor of his unit. Whatever happened to him all those years earlier, whatever experiences he shared or bonds he formed, this death leaves him now utterly alone. After handing the woman his only photograph of his war buddies, he walks away.

In less than five minutes, we meet Rambo, learn his general background, and watch him come to terms with an incalculable loss. As he walks to his next destination, his entire world has changed. The sunny skies have turned gray, and cars speed by him on the road with their windshield wipers on. He turns up the collar on his jacket in response to the cold; we can even see his breath. His smile is long gone.

Rambo follows the traffic into a small town, ironically named Hope, where he has the misfortune of meeting the closest thing First Blood has to a villain: Cops. Not just any cops either, but the top cop of Hope, Sheriff Will Teasle. Without even leaving the safety of his patrol car, Teasle judges and grills Rambo within seconds of seeing him, instantly pegging him as a "drifter" and therefore a problem to be solved. Even though the sheriff maintains a friendly demeanor throughout their conversation as he offers Rambo a ride, he makes it clear that all his "advice" regarding Rambo's appearance is nothing more than a series of thinly-veiled insults.

Truth be told, Sheriff Teasle is hardly an evil man, and I'm certain that from his own perspective, most of his actions in the film made sense at the time. Yet mistreating people does not require malicious intent; Sheriff Teasle views a strange man walking into town as an inherent threat to what he views as keeping the peace. During his drive escorting Rambo to the city limits, Teasle explains all of this to Rambo's face, summing up his position thusly: "You wouldn't like it here anyway. It's just a quiet little town. In fact you might say it's boring. But that's the way we like it, and I get paid to keep it that way."

Perhaps if Rambo hadn't walked lord-knows-how-many miles to discover his last friend in the world was long dead, he would've accepted the sheriff's condescending harassment and simply continued on to the next small town. Instead, he refuses to heed Teasle's abuse and starts to walk back across the invisible line into Hope, getting himself arrested immediately for vagrancy. The situation only worsens back at the station, as the sheriff's deputies all treat Rambo as a freak and a felon, beating him when he doesn't respond to their every whim, hosing him off like a wild animal, and eventually trying to shave him with a straight razor against his will. This last straw triggers Rambo's PTSD from the war and flips him into survival mode, as he hastily overpowers the three men holding him down, escapes onto the streets to steal a moped, and then flees into the hills.

The police respond to Rambo's jailbreak with an all-hands manhunt, arming themselves with full-on assault rifles, and Rambo in turn uses all his wilderness and wildlife training to maim—not kill—his pursuers. He even tells Teasle as much while holding a knife to his throat, making it clear that he could easily slaughter every officer of the law in Hope, but all he wants is for the sheriff to "let it go." Yet when one deputy falls to his death while trying to shoot Rambo, it only motivates the cops to further up their efforts to apprehend their most-wanted vagrant.

At the risk of both-sides-ing the situation, First Blood is a tale of escalation gone awry. The police overstep their authority in manhandling an outsider, so Rambo responds with violence of his own. The cops counter with dogs, guns, and a helicopter, while Rambo retaliates with extreme, if non-lethal, force. This drives Teasle to call in the National Guard, resulting in a shootout and explosion which presumably kills Rambo. He survives, but instead of using the confusion to finally escape, he returns to Hope to shoot up half the town.

As I said earlier, Sheriff Teasle is not an evil man, but he absolutely instigates and exacerbates this situation at every turn. He was wrong for telling Rambo to leave town, wrong to assume his men could recapture Rambo, and decidedly wrong to turn up the heat after Rambo spared his life. Yet he couldn't simply let Rambo walk away after all the crimes he commits during his escape, even though most of Rambo's actions could be viewed as self-defense—particularly in the case of the one fatality.

Meanwhile, Rambo also refuses to take his own advice and "let it go." The audience sympathizes with Rambo because of everything he's been through, and as he puts it, "they drew first blood, not me." Yet in delivering that line over the radio to Colonel Trautman, his former commanding officer, he refuses the colonel's pleas to turn himself in. Just like Teasle did at the start, Rambo now believes he's doing what's right, even as his choices only put himself in greater danger.

While Rambo experiences a palpable catharsis when he unloads an M60 machine gun on main street in Hope, First Blood's true climax comes later when Rambo and Trautman finally talk face-to-face inside the now-demolished police station. With the building surrounded, Trautman walks in unarmed in an attempt to convince Rambo to finally end his rampage. He insists that "this mission is over" and Rambo snaps, unleashing all his pent-up rage and grief and fear in an emotional monologue about how, for him, "nothing is over."

The United States may have pulled their troops out of Vietnam, but for Rambo, his trauma never ends. The violence and death he experienced remain on his mind in perpetuity, but worse than that, his time in the war includes his last happy memories. As a youth in combat, Rambo had responsibilities and comrades and a life. As an adult back home, Rambo has no job, no one on his side, and nothing but the clothes on his back.

I know "show don't tell" is the golden rule of narrative but the power of this scene, shot mostly in the dark with Stallone barely visible, far outshines any number of combat flashbacks that director Ted Kotcheff could have included. Indeed, an entire sequence set in Vietnam was shot but cut from the final film, and its absence makes First Blood all the more impactful. Save for a few frames of prison camp torture intercut with Rambo's abuse at the hands of the police, Sylvester Stallone's face, scarred body, and performance tell us everything we need to know about his Vietnam.

First Blood the film concludes with Trautman walking Rambo out of the station and into police custody. This contrasts the novel which had Trautman kill Rambo with a shotgun. The film very nearly ended on a similar note, as Kotcheff's original cut showed Rambo force Trautman to execute him with his sidearm rather than go to jail. This ending proved unpopular, so reshoots provided Rambo with a peaceful surrender. This ended up working in everyone's favor, for once First Blood became a box office smash, the character of John Rambo could return to the screen. For his part, author David Morell also got a chance to revisit the character, as he ended up penning novelizations of both Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III*, adding a simple author's note to explain the different endings between his version of First Blood and the film.

Therein lies the disparity between Rambo as written on the page and Rambo as seen on the big screen. The novel spends as much time with Teasle as it does with Rambo, establishing the sheriff as a veteran of the Korean War. Morell wrote that he alternated scenes between Teasle and Rambo "so that the reader doesn’t know who to cheer for." The movie is far less ambiguous, though it never paints Teasle as an outright villain, just a disagreeable, arrogant asshole with far too much confidence in his authority.

However, even as First Blood the movie wants viewers to sympathize with Rambo, it never treats him as anything more than human. Yet Rambo's story connected with certain people who elevated him to heroic status. In particular, Rambo's emphatic speech during the finale helped propagate two conversative myths about the Vietnam War. First, that our soldiers could have defeated the North Vietnamese forces "but somebody wouldn't let us win." Second, that  Vietnam veterans were spat upon and called "baby killers" by protestors upon their return. Rambo's reputation as a right-wing jingoist fantasy only grew as the sequels sent the character to Asia so he could engage in direct combat with local and Soviet troops en masse. First Blood depicted Rambo as a man failing to reconcile his military training with civilian life, but the sequels reverse that handicap into a strength. Rambo doesn't need therapy, he just needs a target.

Naturally, it would be this latter version of Rambo who would star in a number of video games during the 1980s, with his general appearance providing unlicensed inspiration to scores of unrelated projects. You can't tell me that Ikari Warriors is anything but SNK asking the question "what if two Rambos invaded Brazil?" Nearly every Rambo or Rambo-esque game embraces him as an invincible killing machine, avoiding the story told in First Blood altogether. Only the maligned 2014 on-rails shooter Rambo: The Video Game includes material derived from the 1982 film, turning Rambo's escape from custody and guerilla tactics into a series of timing-based button-pressing mini-games. Immediately after threatening but sparing Teasle's life in this version of the story, the player grabs an automatic weapon and guns down cops and National Guardsmen by the dozen, something Rambo never does on film, though in fairness the game offers bonus points for "non-lethal shots."

(My favorite bit of unauthorized Rambo video game history comes from Sega's Golden Axe, where players can hear screams from First Blood throughout the adventure when killing monsters or rescuing tormented villagers)

40 years later, with Rambo's reputation now out of any one person's hands, First Blood remains an exciting and engaging film. I was far too young to have any interest in the character back in 1982, and by the time I reached an appropriate age to see R-rated films, Rambo had long become fodder for parody after parody. Only in the late 90s when I worked alongside ardent film fans at a multiplex did my coworkers convince me that First Blood was a must-watch.

Considering the ups and downs of Sylvester Stallone's career since then, I'd argue that makes seeing First Blood an even more satisfying experience in 2022. Even though this film started his journey towards action superstardom, his first performance as Rambo is the polar opposite of the tough guy roles that would come to dominate his films in the decades that followed. In a word, Stallone's debut as Rambo is very un-Rambo-like, and I can only imagine how different his filmography would be if he spent the rest of the 80s exploring more characters like this instead of leaning into stoic machismo. It would have cost the world Cobra, but then again, it would have spared the world Over the Top.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.

*Just like Donkey Kong goes from Jr to 3, there is no "Rambo II"