First Blood

Physical acting by Sylvester Stallone propels high-powered outdoors thriller

Brian Dennehy, Sylvester Stallone and Chris Mulkey in “First Blood”

FIRST BLOOD (1982) is a superbly well crafted suspense film, grounded not in pyrotechnics but in character. Unlike its sequels and the international action genre it helped construct in the 1980s, it’s a survivor of the previous decade, when cinematic anti-heroes like Travis Bickle or Rocky Balboa roamed a broken country. Far from knights in shining armor, these men were creeps or bums staging a last stand and looking to go out with some dignity. The uncertainty surrounding Rambo’s survival is part of what makes the original film so enthralling.

David Morrell was teaching at Penn State in 1968. Among his students, he counted an increasing number of Vietnam veterans, some of which were curious how Morrell had avoided conscription. Their instructor had immigrated to the U.S. from Canada with his wife to pursue an academic study of Ernest Hemingway, who Morrell championed foremost as a great writer of action. Watching the evening news one day, Morrell saw two stories, back to back, one about a firefight in Vietnam, the other about National Guardsmen patrolling an American city ravaged by civil unrest. These planted the seed for a novel that would bring the war in Vietnam home to America. Titled First Blood, Morrell’s debut book was published in 1972. It immediately garnered attention from the film industry.

Sylvester Stallone in “First Blood”

The year it was published, producer Lawrence Turman brought First Blood to the attention of Columbia Pictures. The studio optioned the film rights and assigned Richard Brooks, a USMC veteran who’d adapted and directed The Professionals (1966) and In Cold Blood (1967), to the project. Brooks, who had an actor like Burt Lancaster or Lee Marvin in mind for the antagonist Sheriff Teasle, felt the lawman read like a caricature, with more law enforcement officials in 1972 looking like Rambo, beards or long hair, than the hick sheriffs of old. Brooks spent a year adapting a script. He envisioned an ending in which Rambo attempts to surrender to Teasle, but someone takes a shot at him, killing the fugitive, the triggerman responsible never revealed. Both Morrell and Turman thought it was a terrible idea, while Columbia became reticent of making a picture dealing with the unpopular war as it was still winding down. Brooks departed to make Bite the Bullet (1975) instead.

In 1973, Warner Bros. spent $250,000 to acquire the film rights to First Blood. After offering the lead role to their resident star Clint Eastwood as a courtesy, the studio began to talk seriously about Robert DeNiro as Rambo. Martin Ritt, who’d directed Paul Newman in six films including literary adaptations like Hud (1963) and Hombre (1967), agreed to direct. Rather than a western hero, Ritt viewed Rambo as a broken cog, the U.S. Army responsible for the chaos he unleashed when coming home. Both Rambo and Teasle were to perish in Ritt’s version, while Col. Trautman, Rambo’s commanding officer in the Green Berets, emerged as the real villain. Ritt couldn’t make that play, screenwriter Walter Newman turning in three drafts. Ritt’s notion of casting Paul Newman as Rambo and perhaps Robert Mitchum as Teasle never came to pass.

Brian Dennehy in “First Blood”

Director Sydney Pollack read First Blood and by early 1975 became interested in directing. He envisioned the biggest star in the world at that time, Steve McQueen, playing Rambo and Burt Lancaster as Teasle. Pollack seized on the novel’s potential for commentary on the Vietnam War without being a war movie. Before assigning a writer, Pollack realized “the book was something of a cheat,” feeling Morrell used the war as an excuse for violence rather than an opportunity to explore its roots. Pollack dropped out. Next up was Martin Bregman, the talent manager turned producer who came aboard to develop First Blood as a vehicle for one of his top clients: Al Pacino. In 1975, Vietnam veteran and playwright David Rabe was hired to adapt a new script. Rabe combined Teasle and Trautman into one character. His take on Rambo was to regard him as a force of nature, escalating the conflict initiated by the sheriff’s department to lunatic extremes. Pacino, who’d go on to star in Cruising (1980) and Scarface (1983), thought the script too extreme, and passed. Rabe’s adaptation ended with Rambo committing suicide by cop.

Sylvester Stallone and Brian Dennehy in “First Blood”

In 1977, producer William Sackheim optioned First Blood. He adapted a new script with Michael Kozoll, whom he’d worked with on the short-lived LAPD detective series Delvecchio. Sackheim hoped John Badham would direct and John Travolta star in a follow-up to their collaboration on Saturday Night Fever (1977). Sackheim & Kozoll spent eight months working on a new script. They viewed Rambo and Teasle as tragic figures, and Trautman as well, the colonel realizing he needed to atone for exploiting Rambo and setting in motion the chaos his recruit unleashed. John Frankenheimer agreed to direct, and after considering Nick Nolte, Michael Douglas and Powers Boothe for Rambo, cast Brad Davis of Midnight Express (1978). Cinema Group Pictures was set to finance, but when their distributor Filmways was absorbed by Orion Pictures, First Blood was shelved again.

Sylvester Stallone and David Caruso in “First Blood”

Producers Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna, who’d been acting as agents for American film producers in markets overseas, were looking to inaugurate their new company Carolco Pictures with a big project. Warner Bros. was selling off properties they were seeking to recoup development costs on and Carolco ponied up $375,000 for First Blood, kicking in another $150,000 to Cinema Group for Sackheim & Kozoll’s script. The producers wanted to work with Ted Kotcheff, a television veteran who’d graduated to directing feature films like The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) and North Dallas Forty (1979). Kotcheff had plenty of ideas about First Blood because Warner Bros. had offered him directing duties in 1976. Rather than portray Rambo as the lunatic of Rabe’s script, Kotcheff’s take was that the character would be the victim of his circumstances. The director had one actor in mind for the role: Sylvester Stallone. This was considered a risk for all involved.

Chris Mulkey, David Caruso, Sylvester Stallone and Jack Starrett in “First Blood”

Four films Stallone had starred in since becoming a superstar in Rocky (1976) had failed to duplicate that film’s commercial success, a fifth—Rocky II (1979)—being the exception. And no one had figured out how to make First Blood work. Between July and November 1981, Stallone wrote seven drafts of the script. His major contribution was a populist understanding of the character of John J. Rambo. Stallone saw him as a man who respected his country’s institutions, had sacrificed himself for those institutions, but was at odds with some of those running these institutions, like Teasle. Stallone also stripped so much of his character’s dialogue that several drafts had Rambo speaking not a word.

Brian Dennehy in “First Blood”

When it came to writing his character’s climactic speech, Stallone imagined a man no one had bothered listening to for five years being given one minute to get everything he’d been holding inside off his chest. At the eleventh hour, Kotcheff separately brought in two screenwriters he’d worked with to polish a production draft. David Giler attempted to introduce some levity which didn’t make the final cut, while Larry Gross, whose intuition that Teasle needed to be more complicated than portrayed, did contribute the best line in the movie. Trautman radios Rambo, “Well, look, John, we can’t have you running around out there wasting friendly civilians.” Rambo replies, “There are no friendly civilians.” The WGA would award screenplay credit to William Sackheim & Michael Kozoll and Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel by David Morrell.

Sylvester Stallone in “First Blood”

Brian Dennehy, who Kotcheff had worked with on Split Image (1982), was cast as Teasle, and Kirk Douglas as Col. Trautman. Douglas’ suggestions for his character and dialogue reached an impasse when he proposed an ending in which Trautman would in effect be possessed by the spirit of Rambo, becoming the film’s hero. Rather than play his scenes as written, Douglas backed out just as production began, to be replaced by Richard Crenna. Shooting commenced November 1981 in the town of Hope, British Columbia. The wilderness sequences would be filmed in Golden Ears Park, also in British Columbia. (Ted Kotcheff, a Canadian director, would joke that given David Morrell was a native Canadian and the picture shot in Canada, First Blood was a Canadian movie). Weather proved costly, the production shutting down for two months due to snow, remnants of which crew members had to melt with butane lighters so it would match what had shot.

The ending remained undecided. As scripted and shot, Trautman pulls a pistol on Rambo, which the fugitive walks into, killing himself. Stallone expressed reservations about this to Kotcheff, believing that audiences would hate them for killing a character whose survival they’d invested in for almost two hours. Kotcheff agreed, predicting that when it came time to screen the film for distributors, American studios would want the ending changed to one in which Stallone survived anyway. He quickly convened shots in which Rambo is led out of the police station in handcuffs by Trautman, with Teasle shown on a stretcher, alive. Tested for the first time in Las Vegas with the scripted ending, the audience loudly rejected Rambo’s death.

Brian Dennehy and Sylvester Stallone in “First Blood”

Without anticipating Rambo might become a cultural icon or thinking of sequels, Kotcheff, Kassar, and Carolco’s line producer Buzz Feitshans decided to spare Rambo’s life. Screened for distributors, Orion Pictures posed no objections to this ending. Opening October 1982 in the U.S., First Blood was the #1 grossing film in the country its first three weekends of release, #2 for another two weekends and #3 over Thanksgiving weekend and the weekend after, making it Stallone’s first hit in which he didn’t play a boxer from Philadelphia. Retaining ownership of the film, the success of First Blood would enable Carolco to go public. Over the next twelve years, the company spent lavishly on its slate, which included Rambo III (1988) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), at that time the most expensive movies ever made.

Brian Dennehy, Bill McKinney, Patrick Stack and Richard Crenna in “First Blood”

First Blood is bookended and anchored beautifully by Sylvester Stallone’s performance. In contrast to the lovable Rocky Balboa, who in the first two films of that series, doesn’t know when to shut up, Rambo doesn’t know how to open up, and in First Blood, we understand why. Visiting the home of an army buddy, Stallone’s gentleness and vulnerability reveal themselves, qualities that he maintains when harassed by Teasle and assaulted by the sheriff’s men. Viewed today, the original film is stunning in how little it resembles an eighties action spectacle and how well it explores post-traumatic stress, the material’s roots as a novel in the seventies clearly a part of the film’s DNA. After building tremendous momentum through Rambo’s escape from captivity and ambush of Teasle’s hunting party, the movie loses momentum when Richard Crenna, hamming it up a bit, enters the film. It’s hard to ignore how much more authority an actor like Kirk Douglas or Robert Mitchum would’ve brought to the part. Once the filmmakers establish that Rambo isn’t going to murder the posse gunning for him, First Blood unfolds more like a movie, a bloodless 1950s western, and less like a public emergency that really could be happening.

Sylvester Stallone in “First Blood”

Teasle is not a complete character, at best missing a line of dialogue that would help make his hatred of Rambo clear, but Brian Dennehy is terrific at making what is essentially a western bad guy seem human. The film is sensational looking, shot in anamorphic widescreen by Andrew Laszlo, who lit The Warriors (1979) and Southern Comfort (1981) for director Walter Hill, supreme examples of action choreography and outdoor photography which reach their zenith here. Set in Oregon in December, the crisp, rugged mountain environment looks and feels formidable. Also on the payroll is composer Jerry Goldsmith, who fit this job between Poltergeist (1982) and Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), propelling the movie forward in its action and striking quiet notes when Rambo is alone in his thoughts. Ted Kotcheff, who directed a compelling POW rescue fantasy with his next film, Uncommon Valor (1983), unfortunately never reteamed with Stallone, who wouldn’t bare himself this emotionally on screen until Cop Land (1997).

Video rental category: Action/ Adventure

Special interest: One-Man Army