First Blood

Ted Kotcheff’s film, taken from David Morrell’s novel, is the one the Rambo name was built on, and it is a stranger and sadder thing than that name now suggests. A Vietnam veteran walks into a small town wanting a meal, the sheriff decides he is the wrong sort, and within half an hour the two of them are at war in the woods. The screenplay, by William Sackheim, Michael Kozoll and Sylvester Stallone, gets all this done in 93 minutes and wastes few of them. It is a good, cold, fast thriller with something on its mind, and it does not manage to think that something through. We liked it a good deal more than its reputation told us to.

Stallone says almost nothing for most of the running time, and the film is better for the quiet. He walks into Hope with a stoop and a rolled sleeping bag, and when a woman on a porch tells him his friend is dead he stands there and takes it. Brian Dennehy plays Sheriff Teasle as a man who keeps a tidy town and is used to being thanked for it. He gives an order, it is disobeyed, and he cannot be seen to take it back; that is the whole engine of the film, and Dennehy keeps it turning. Richard Crenna turns up in dress uniform as Colonel Trautman and talks about Rambo the way an engineer talks about a bridge he built. Proud or appalled, Crenna never lets on.

Andrew Laszlo shoots the Pacific Northwest under a lid of cloud. The town is wet tarmac and brown brick; the forest is so dark a green it reads as black, and the rain never quite stops. Wolf Kroeger’s police station is cream tile and iron bars, a room built to be hosed down. Joan E. Chapman cuts the scene in the cells so that a razor in the present and a blade in a prison camp trade places a few frames at a time, and we understood his panic before anyone explained it. Jerry Goldsmith gives Rambo a lonely trumpet line and gives the pursuit a sawing figure in the strings, and the motorbike-and-police-car chase out of town, downhill on gravel, is as well put together as any chase of its decade.

Here is what we felt. When Rambo picks off Teasle’s men one at a time in the trees, each of them wounded rather than killed, we felt a cheer coming and let it come, then felt slightly ashamed, because the film had spent twenty minutes telling us this man was damaged and now wanted us to enjoy the damage. Then, near the end, Kotcheff gives Stallone a scene we will not describe, and it moved us far more than we expected. His face comes apart in stages, the words arrive in the wrong order, and for the first time the film stops being about what he can do and is about what was done to him.

The second half is where the credibility goes. A man steps off a cliff into pine branches and walks on. The state police, under Bill McKinney’s Captain Kern, are brought in so that they can be outwitted, and the National Guard arrive to be laughed at. The politics wobble too. The film tells us the war did this to him, and tells us Hope did this to him, and then has Rambo insist the town drew first blood, which the script treats as an answer rather than an excuse. Of the deputies, only David Caruso’s Mitch, who flinches, and Jack Starrett’s Galt, who enjoys himself, are people. The rest are jackets.

For a film whose title became a byword for slaughter, it kills remarkably few, and the restraint is what dates best. Here he wants something to eat, somewhere to sleep and nobody to put hands on him, and the drama is in how little it would have cost to let him have that. See it on a wet evening with the lights off, and go to bed before anyone suggests the sequel.