An Outbreak of Rambomania

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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."