TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/85/85capsb.1

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 9.2 KB | 177 lines

                p                                                              June 24, 1985

CINEMA

An Outbreak of Rambomania


Sylvester Stallone starts Hollywood's summer with a bang


Beads of sweat glisten, pectoral muscles ripple, veins bulge in
steamy close-up. They call him "a pure fighting machine," this
glum- faced superhero with the Charles Atlas body. He has been
sent on a daring mission to Viet Nam, a land that just a few
years ago the nation was trying to gorget. Improbably--or maybe
all too probably-- he has become America's newest pop hero. His
name:  Rambo.

Rambo is, of course, Sylvester Stallone's latest cinematic
creation, a brooding View Nam veteran who unleashes destruction
in the summer's first blockbuster hit, Rambo:  First Blood Part
II. In this sequel to Stallone's 1982 film First Blood, a crack
veteran of the Green Beret Special Forces is sent back to Viet
Nam to search for U.S. prisoners of war, only to be abandoned
in the jungle and forced to guerrilla-fight his way out. In its
first 23 days of release, Rambo, which cost $27 million to
produce, had grossed a phenomenal $78.8 million at the box
office. Only two films in history, Indiana Jones and the Temple
of Doom and Return of the Jedi, have had more successful
launches.

Rambomania is spreading faster than the fire storms set by the
hero's explosive warheads. Hollywood megahits of summers past
have flooded the market with such whimsical souvenirs as furry
Gremlins and cuddly E.T.s. This year stores are stocking up
with war paraphernalia:  a $150 replica of Rambo's high-tech bow
and arrow, Rambo knives and an assortment of toy guns, including
a semiautomatic job that squirts a stream of water 10  ft.
Youngsters will soon be able to pop Rambo vitamins, and New
Yorkers can send a Rambogram, in which a Stallone look-alike
will deliver a birthday message or carry out a tough assignment
like asking the boss for a raise. The U.S. Army has started
hanging Rambo posters outside its recruitment offices, hoping to
lure enlistees. Rambo fever is even spreading overseas. The
film has already broken box-office records in Beirut and the
Philippines, and 25 companies have signed contracts to
distribute Rambo merchandise, even in countries where the film
has not yet opened.

Like the ubiquitous Rocky films, Rambo represents another
triumph for Stallone's distinctive brand of macho Americana.
Stallone, who conceived of the film and co-wrote the script, is
reveling in the popularity of his latest patriotic fable.
"People have been waiting for a chance to express their
patriotism," he says. "Rambo triggered long-suppressed emotions
that had been out of vogue. Suddenly, apple pie is an important
thing on the menu."

There is more. "I want this country to love us as much as we
loved it," pleads Rambo on behalf of Viet Nam vets at the end
of the film, and Stallone wants the nation to take heed. "The
vets were fed by a sense of duty," he says. "They wanted to
come home and be heroes on their blocks. They're saying, 'We
showed you we were worthy. We just want to be appreciated.'"

In First Blood, the unappreciated Rambo was goaded into waging
a one-man war against National Guardsmen in the mountains of
the Pacific Northwest. In the sequel, after a stretch in
prison, he moves from a surrogate Viet Nam to the real thing.
At the request of his former commander (Richard Crenna), Rambo
takes on a dangerous reconnaissance mission to search out MIAs
in Viet Nam. Sure enough, he finds some in a supposedly
deserted prison camp, guarded by sinister Vietnamese and their
evil Soviet overlords. But his mission is sabotaged by the top
military brass, who want to close the book on the whole MIA
episode. The allegorical message of the film is potent. Like
American soldiers in Viet Nam, Rambo tries to do a job but is
defeated by his superiors. Left to his own devices, however, he
shows all the skill, cunning and ruthlessness that the enemy
once showed against the U.S. And this time he wins.

Rambo seems to have perfectly articulated the nation's mood
with regard to Viet Nam. "In general, the public feels that
Viet Nam was a tragedy, an experience they don't want to
repeat," says Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam:  A History.
"But at the same time, there's an attempt to find some redeeming
aspects in it. Movies can turn a defeat into victory; you can
achieve in fantasy what you didn't achieve in reality."  Says
Arthur Egendorf, a clinical psychologist and author of Healing
from the War:  Trauma and Transformation After Vietnam:  "Rambo
is an effort to deal with a complex, painful and deep wound with
simple and sentimental responses. Part of the psychological
potency of fairy tales such as these is that they dramatize our
own inner struggles."

Distance from the war has made such mythologizing possible.
When Author David Morrell began shopping his 1972 novel First
Blood around Hollywood, the political climate was quite
different. Viet Nam movies of the late '70s, like Coming Home
and Apocalypse Now, portrayed the war as a largely ignoble
enterprise. "The subject matter was a risk," says Morrell.
Such heavy Hollywood names as Martin Ritt, Sydney Pollack, Steve
McQueen and John Frankenheimer were involved in various efforts
to film the novel. It finally wound up in the hands of two
little-known producers, Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar, who hired
Stallone and raised the money to make the film.

First Blood made $57 million at the box office, a substantial
though not spectacular success. Since then the public's
receptivity to tales that lend mobility to the Viet Nam War has
grown. Films like Missing in Action and Uncommon Valor, both
of them about missions to rescue American POWs in Viet Nam, drew
big audiences. On TV, Viet Nam veterans, once portrayed as
troubled loners, are now the sympathetic crime fighters of such
hit shows as The A-Team and Magnum, P.I. First Blood scored
unusually high ratings in a telecast on NBC last month, and
orders for video cassettes of the film have jumped 25% since the
release of Rambo.

The idea for the sequel came to Stallone in July 1983, when he
received a letter from a woman in Virginia whose husband has
been missing in Southeast Asia for 16 years. "It got to me,"
he says. "I'm convinced that the MIAs are alive. Living in
Laos. There's been a great avoidance of the issue. The country
has been shoving it under the mat and forgetting it."

After working on the script with James Cameron, who co-wrote
and directed The Terminator, Stallone prepared for the shooting
in Mexico with a five-hour-a-day regime of physical exercise,
twice as hard as he works out for a typical Rocky film. In
addition to rowing, weight lifting and jogging, Stallone took
archery lessons at home in Pacific Palisades, Calif., and worked
out with the Los Angeles police SWAT team.

Obviously the sight of this marvelous physical specimen
cavorting through the jungles in a series of brutally effective,
strikingly photographed action scenes is a big part of the
movie's appeal, regardless of ideology. Rambo has echoes of
half a dozen movie heroes of old, from Tarzan to Shane, and his
Vietnamese and Soviet foes are updated versions of the
malevolent Japanese and Germans from World War II films. The
cheers that erupt in the theater as the body count soars are
coming largely from young moviegoers whose only previous
encounter with Viet Nam may have been a question on The
Hollywood Squares. "The movie doesn't have a lot to do with
Viet Nam and how we felt when we were there," says Josiah
Bunting III, a Viet Nam veteran who is now president of
Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. "It's impossible to take
seriously, but it's very enjoyable."

Some critics read more ominous messages in the film's
popularity. The contend that it reflects a growing
anti-Communist fervor and could help make military conflicts in
Nicaragua or elsewhere more acceptable at home. Others argue
that the film is serving a legitimate therapeutic function.
"We're in the process of assimilating Viet Nam into our American
experience," says Henry Graff, professor of history at Columbia
University. "Pictures like Rambo allow us to think it through
20 years later without the pain of the casualty lists before
us."  Stallone is impatient with critics who call the film
reactionary. "So it's a right-wing fantasy," he says. "Like
Valley Forge. They did it their way, too, against the British.
No one told them from Washington how to fight. This is the
point:  frustrated Americans trying to recapture some glory.
The vets were told wrong. The people who pushed the wrong
buttons all took a powder. The vets got the raw deal and were
left holding the bag. What Rambo is saying is that if they
could fight again, it would be different."

As a righter of past wrongs, an exorcist of guilt, a hero in a
age painfully short of them, Rambo has not finished his
cinematic job. Stallone is already committed to making Rambo
III, and is looking for another "open wound" that Rambo can
heal. It could be in Iran, or possibly Afghanistan, but he will
be back. "Rambo," says Stallone, "is a war machine that can't
be turned off."

--By Richard Zoglin.  Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York and
Richard Woodbury/Los Angeles