An Outbreak of Rambomania

By Richard Zoglin

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 forget. 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 Viet 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, has grossed a phenomenal $75.8 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 nobility 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 regimen 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. They contend that it reflects a growing antiCommunist 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 an 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."

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/New York and Richard Woodbury/Los Angeles