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 …