An Outbreak of Rambomania

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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."