First Blood (Anabasis N.V., Cinema ’84, Elcajo Productions, Orion, 1982)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching “In Order to Be Free,” the first episode of Ken Burns’s mega-documentary on the American Revolution, I ran my husband Charles the 1982 film First Blood, starring Sylvester Stallone in his first performance as John Rambo, ex-Special Forces fighter in Viet Nam who returns stateside and gets into huge amounts of trouble. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have gone near First Blood or anything else featuring Stallone, especially Stallone as Rambo, but I’m on assignment from Fanfare magazine to review a new recording of the soundtrack music by Jerry Goldsmith, who seems to have done especially well with war movies: Patton, MacArthur, and his amazing score for the 1981 film Inchon despite its horrible reputation as a movie. (The horrible reputation is not altogether deserved; though it was executive produced by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, it’s a mediocre movie rather than a terrible one, and Goldsmith’s score is one of its best aspects. I actually got to see Inchon and review it: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/06/inchon-one-way-productions-unification.html.) First Blood began life as a novel by David Morrell and was turned into a screenplay by Michael Kozoli and William Sackheim, though after they were done Stallone himself rewrote it and did enough work he was entitled to co-writer credit. First Blood takes place in the small town of Hope in Washington state (though it was “played” by British Columbia, Canada, just across the border), whose name seems to be the writers’ idea of irony. John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) arrives in Hope to pay his respects to an African-American member of his company who was the only other soldier in his unit to survive the war – only he learns from the man’s widow that he didn’t survive the war after all. He died years later of cancer from exposure to all the Agent Orange the U.S. forces in Viet Nam sprayed hither and yon as a defoliant.

Rambo is accosted by the town sheriff, Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy, whose authority helps make up for Stallone’s embarrassing non-acting in the lead), who for some reason doesn’t want him in town and will do just about anything to get rid of him. For a while I was wondering if Teasle and his deputies – including a young David Caruso as Mitch Rogers (and of course Charles couldn’t help but mention Caruso’s boneheaded decision to leave the cast of the high-rated TV series NYPD Blue after its first season to pursue a film career that never took off) – were involved in some horrific scheme of corruption that they were worried Rambo would uncover, but no-o-o-o-o: they just don’t like seedy-looking, scruffy guys with three days’ worth of facial hair and an overall hostile disposition. After Teasle tries to give Rambo a ride out of town and Rambo manages to get out of the car, Teasle has him arrested. Jailing Rambo has little or no effect on him; he refuses to be fingerprinted and they have to turn a hose on him to get him to shower. Throughout his incarceration he flashes back to incidents that happened to him in Viet Nam, including being held by North Viet Namese who literally dumped shit on him (an interesting anticipation of Donald Trump’s response to the last “No Kings” protests October 18, which was to make an AI-generated video in which he played an Air Force pilot bombing the protesters with shit). Rambo escapes absurdly easily and the rest of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game in which the mouse is a highly trained ex-Green Beret skilled at both using ready-made weapons (including a super-sharp knife he brought into the jail with him and a rifle he scores from a helicopter pilot who flies into the mountain country to apprehend him, only he loses control when Rambo throws a rock at the chopper’s windshield) and making his own. Among his home-made weapons are a series of stakes with which he impales one of the deputies looking for him, and another one in which he impales a boar (the credits actually list Hugh Oaks as “boar handler”) and roasts it for dinner. The movie’s whole schtick is that Rambo is so good at jungle survival and one-person fighting he’s able to take out virtually all the deputies who try to catch him – including Sheriff Teasle’s best friend, deputy sergeant Arthur Galt (Jack Starrett), whose death at Rambo’s hands makes it personal for Teasle. (Watching this movie it’s easy to see why Stallone was considered for the role of Superman in the late-1970’s franchise, though Christopher Reeve got the part instead.)

A deus ex machina arrives in the person of Col. Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna, who like Dennehy was a great actor who helps make up for Stallone’s incompetence), Rambo’s former commander in Viet Nam. Trautman explains to Teasle that Rambo is a first-rate combat fighter and survivalist, and the only way they’ll be able to stop him is if they can persuade him to turn himself in voluntarily and without bloodshed. This Rambo is unwilling to do, especially since (as he explains), “They drew first blood” – the only explanation we get for the film’s title and the reason Rambo turned from just hostile to homicidal. Ultimately Trautman talks Rambo into giving himself up for him after telling him, “You did everything to make this private war happen. You've done enough damage. This mission is over, Rambo. Do you understand me? This mission is over! Look at them out there! Look at them! If you won't end this now, they will kill you. Is that what you want? It's over, Johnny. It's over!” Rambo replies, in a speech that could have been quite moving if delivered by an actor with any skill at all (imagine it from John Garfield in the 1940’s), “Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off! It wasn't my war! You asked me, I didn't ask you! And I did what I had to do to win! But somebody wouldn't let us win! And I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting. Calling me baby killer and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me, huh? Who are they? Unless they've been me and been there and know what the hell they're yelling about! … Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge of million-dollar equipment. Back here I can't even hold a job parking cars!”

I’m not sure I’d call First Blood a bad movie with a good one trapped inside it trying to get out, but certainly there was more potential in this story – a man with the mother of all post-traumatic stress disorders trying in vain to adjust to civilian life, while his Special Forces training keeps kicking in and turning him into an antisocial monster – than got realized in the film we have. I remember an episode of the radio show The Shadow, with Orson Welles as Lamont Cranston and Agnes Moorehead as Margo Lane, called “The Silent Avenger” (aired March 13, 1938), in which the killer was a former World War I soldier whose bitterness over how he’d been treated led him to do freelance random murders. That show succeeded where First Blood failed in humanizing the villain and also implicitly condemning war itself as something that turns ordinary human beings into barely controllable (and sometimes uncontrollable) monsters. First Blood did well enough at the box office to merit a sequel, Rambo (1985), which became one of the biggest hits and most iconic Right-wing films of the Reagan era; in it, Trautman sets Rambo free to return to Viet Nam and find American prisoners still being held as “missing in action” by the victorious North Viet Namese. While First Blood was made by a quirky but fascinating director, Ted Kotcheff, whose previous credits had mostly been for whimsical comedies like The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and the anti-capitalist satire Fun with Dick and Jane, Rambo was directed by one George P. Cosmatos, who was so slovenly as a filmmaker Fanfare critic Royal S. Brown joked that his last name should have been “Comatos.”