Contest: My Favorite Movie Saga

“He was a soldier, but became a legend” - this is one of the slogans of the film “Rambo. Last Blood ”, which starts at the box office today, September 19. James John Rambo - angry, tired, but just veteran - will defend his family and fight evil - there is still enough of him in the world. If today all the tickets in the theaters have already been sold out, it's not scary: there is time to review the four previous parts of the saga. In the meantime, we will remember all the "Rambo".

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The book came out first. David Morrell, Ph.D., decided to write about how the Vietnam War affected not only those who participated in it, but also the American society after talking with students at the University of Iowa. The future author of the bestselling book "First Blood" taught them American literature and could not help but notice the massive student protests against US participation in the war. The hero of the novel is a veteran with PTSD who returned from Vietnam and found that he was not a hero at home, but a burden. The authorities open a hunt for Rambo - and he fights them the way he used to: using military methods.

Morrell, like many other writers, was not alien to anything human. While writing the book, he suffered from procrastination - he could not think of a name for the main character. His wife helped him out and brought him apples. “I took a bite just once and thought - delicious! I asked what sort it was. " The variety was called "Rambo".

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The novel was published in 1972, immediately received critical acclaim, and in the following years was translated into 26 languages. Morrell devoted himself entirely to literature - he wrote 29 more books, two of which told the continuation of the story of the "green beret" Rambo. Stephen King, who taught briefly at the University of Maine, and graduated himself, taught creative writing to students from several books. One of them was the novel First Blood.

The film rights from Morrell were bought by Columbia Pictures, and later resold by Warner Brothers. Bidding for the plot, the image of the hero and the castes went on for almost ten years. There is a version that the script had 26 options, and in each of them Rambo looks different. Therefore, the actors for the role were auditioned completely diverse: Al Pacino, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Clint Eastwood. Steve McQueen, the first contender for the role, eventually seemed to the producers too old to play a Vietnam War veteran, Pacino wanted to make Rambo as cruel and cut off from peaceful reality as possible, while Hoffman, on the other hand, seemed too cruel. The role was given to Sylvester Stallone.

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There are two reasons why Stallone became interested in the story of a veteran with PTSD who did not find a place for himself in a peaceful life. The first is the fear of being held hostage to the image of the dimwitted boxer Rocky Balboa (by 1982, three films had already been released). The second is a desire to express sympathy for the veterans who, according to him, were deceived. “It was clear back in 1970 that we could not win this war,” Stallone said. "It was hard for me to hear how the soldiers were later called infanticides." At some point, Sly hesitated - the script was being rewritten and rewritten, in some versions Rambo looked exactly what Stallone did not want to become: a cruel killer.

Rambo could only have one story: in the original version of the 1982 film, the protagonist dies in the finale. Before the release, the film was shown in a focus group, and at the moment of John Rambo's death, silence hung in the hall, and then a voice rang out: "Director, if you are here, I'll kick your face!" Director Ted Kotcheff left Rambo alive, later, in the fourth part of the film, Sylvester Stallone (who by that time had already sat in the director's chair) showed the scene of the death of the hero - according to the plot, he dreams of it.

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The knives used by Rambo in the third and fourth parts of the saga were created by the famous American knifetmaker. Jill Hibben... His knives were bought by Elvis Presley, Steven Seagal, John Travolta and Debbie Harry. After Rambo III was released, Hidden sold 250,000 copies of the Stallone Knife. By the way, during the filming of the third part of the film, Jill recorded a training video for the actor on how to forge knives correctly. Sly played it, but the scene was not included in the final version of the film. Stallone and Jill are still friends - Hibben still lives in LaGrande and, with his wife and children, makes custom-made knives.

The absolute box office record was set by the second tape: "Rambo: First Blood-2". The film earned $ 300 million at the box office. The director was John Paz Kosmatos - unlike his predecessor Ted Kotcheff, he agreed with all Stallone's edits: for example, the actor categorically refused to introduce John Travolta into the plot - he was supposed to play his partner, but was replaced by a Vietnamese woman. According to rumors, the jealous Sly was worried that in the frame Travolta would pull the blanket over himself, and Travolta himself sulked at his colleague for this setup for many years.

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Sylvester Stallone has only one positive award for films about Rambo (Golden Raspberries do not count): in 1982, the young German film award The Jupiter Award named him “Best Foreign Actor”. But "Rocky", whose hostage Stallone was so afraid to become at the beginning of his career, was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe.

The name of the new film is “Rambo. Last Blood "seems to hint that it's time for the saga to retire - Sylvester Stallone is 73 years old, his hero is about the same. But Stallone himself believes that neither the name nor the age has any meaning. “Let me tell you something about the last one,” the actor said in June 2019. “You know, I thought Rocky III would also be the last - and now I don’t know anything. If the film goes well, I'll just continue, because I really like it. "

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