FEW action movie heroes are as iconic as Rambo, the titular character of an entire franchise of films that has spanned from the 1980s to the present day.
With that, all sorts of claims have been made since Sylvester Stallone stepped into the boots of John Rambo.
One of those that have endured is one stating that the first film and its title, First Blood, is based on a book by thriller author David Morrell.
Is this true?
VERDICT:
TRUE
David Morrell wrote First Blood in 1972—ten years before the movie hit the silver screen—and it was his first novel.
Morrell himself said in a 2018 interview with Niall Browne of the website Movies in Focus that he began writing First Blood when he was in his mid-20s and that it took him three years to finish.
“I was learning how to write a novel. It was my first, and sometimes I wasn’t sure if I could finish it. The ultimate goal I aimed for was an action novel, which didn’t feel like a genre novel,” said Morrell.
He added that he tried to avoid the clichés and tropes of an action novel when writing his breakthrough work in the thriller genre.
“I wanted the characters to feel real. That’s why it took me so long; I didn’t want to take shortcuts. There are all sorts of cliches in action movies, and I didn’t want to go in that direction. I wanted to try a new way to write action,” he said.
Morrell added that when First Blood hit the shelves in 1972, there weren't many thrillers on the bestseller list.
“I always thought the odds were against it and was surprised that every important journal and magazine reviewed it. It was very exciting, but the fact that it took ten years for the film to get made made me wonder if it would ever get made,” he added.
What does Morrell think about all the directions Rambo has taken in the movies that have come out since cinema audiences saw First Blood at the dawn of the 80s?
“When you look at the film adaptation, the character is not bitter or angry. He’s, in his own way, sorrowful at the start of the film. He’s a victim.
If you look at the second film, all of a sudden, he's jingoistic, and he’s almost a recruitment poster for the military. The same with the third film,” said Morrell.
He added that the character changed again in the fourth film—2008’s Rambo—and shared the reason for that.
“Stallone told me when he was making the fourth film that, in retrospect, he wasn’t happy with the second and third films because they glorified the violence.
He thought the fourth film should go back to the bitterness and anger that my character in the novel had,” said Morrell.
“We have all these different Rambos. So, I think of myself as having given birth to a character who grew up and, in a way, went off in all different directions,” he added.
References:
https://www.moviesinfocus.com/
https://horror.org/nuts-bolts-
