How Sylvester Stallone Rescued the First Rambo Film With a Radical Recut, Cutting It From 3½ Hours to 93 Minutes
About a year ago, a certain kind of cinephile took note of obituaries for Ted Kotcheff, a television-turned-film director who worked steadily from the mid-fifties to the mid-nineties. Even to readers only casually acquainted with movies, more than one title pops out from his filmography: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Fun with Dick and Jane, North Dallas Forty, Weekend at Bernie’s. The focus on genres, and their variety, suggests not an auteur but a journeyman, the kind of efficient, versatile problem-solver that used to keep Hollywood afloat. But occasionally, the work of a journeyman can achieve its own kind of transcendence: that moment came with First Blood, in Kotcheff’s case, which launched the Rambo series in 1982. Those who remember Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo as a headbanded one-man army bent on re-fighting and winning the Vietnam War, one bout of ultra-violence at a time, will be surprised by the relative meekness of his first onscreen incarnation. As First Blood’s story is summarized by the CinemaStix video above, Rambo drifts into a small Washington town after a search for …
