First Blood

Ted Kotcheff’s 1982 film opens with John Rambo, back from Vietnam, being driven out of a small town. Morrell’s 1972 novel is a different object. On his own site Morrell writes that its ending is surprisingly different from the movie’s, and that he developed the police chief so fully that many reviewers took him for the protagonist. Morrell puts the novel’s body count at perhaps 250 people. Here exactly one person dies on screen: deputy Galt, who falls from a helicopter after Rambo throws a rock. The softening was deliberate: executive producer Andrew Vajna said they did not want a crazy murderer but someone lost and caught by circumstance. The novel’s ending was in fact filmed: Trautman cannot pull the trigger, so Rambo turns the gun on himself. Kotcheff called it the hara kiri ending, Stallone objected the same day, and the ending we have was invented on the spot. The rough cut ran three hours. Stallone said they tried to buy it back and burn the negative, then proposed cutting every one of his lines. The release runs 93 minutes. The right film for a viewer who wants a lead who barely speaks and is assembled from what everyone else says about him. Not for anyone arriving from the sequels, where the counter does not stop at one.