BIRTH OF LEGENDS
O'Brien, Tom
Screen BIRTH OF LEGENDS UNCHAINING LOSS & HISTORY According to Santayana, "those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it." The question these days is,"Which history?" Use of the...
...pure evil, and Stallone's performance makes the aging Roger Moore's simultaneous reappearance as James Bond in A View to a Kill pale to insignificance...
...Both men won best acting awards in Cannes in 1984...
...In Rambo he blends the victim status of the veteran and POW with the classic, loner-maverick image of American legend...
...Use of the popular phrase, "No more Vietnams," illustrates just how far proverbs get you in dealing with life...
...Barron seems to have wanted to catch the hectic, frenzied rhythm of adolescence...
...Rambo joins them like the two cannisters which, together, are supposed to detonate our binary nerve gas weapons...
...The massacre over, the nobles follow Paco as he sniffs along the ground like a dog, in pure bliss to be at their service...
...stripped to a few rags, his body complements this stark minimalism...
...Unfortunately, the climax is not well prepared dramatically, and the whole tale is told in complicated flashbacks that weaken its impact...
...HISTORY ALSO dominates several recent European imports, although not in the manner of Rambo...
...To one group of Americans it means never fight another war against a third-world country...
...He disdains the hi-tech with which he is equipped and against which he must fight...
...there's even a final helicopter chase scene that redeems the cliched quality of such sequences...
...As Santayana once suggested, some even learn...
...To be sure, whatever one's feelings about Vietnam, it was wrong to blame GIs drafted into fighting, or skimp on their benefits thereafter...
...But the problem with Stallone's mythmaking is that somebody did fight like Rambo in Vietnam the Vietcong, with their primitive technology and expertise in jungle warfare that mysteriously seems to desert them in the film when confronted by Stallone...
...The screenplay is rushed, as if Barron were afraid to let a single dialogue last more than twenty lines, hardly helpful in a film about emotional development...
...servicemen and the outcome of the Vietnam War...
...You could almost run for president on such a myth...
...The film lasts less than two hours, but not a moment is wasted...
...Stallone, who co-wrote the screenplay, provides heroism on a grand scale, and George Cosmatos uses superb editing to play every card in an action director's deck...
...There is no question what Sylvester Stallone thinks, or rather feels (and here, the distinction is key...
...The Indian motif is at the center of the revisionism in Rambo: its image of the American soldier as victim...
...Paco's deep loyalty eventually makes for stark tragedy at the end of the film, intended by director Mario Camus (director of The Beehive) as a metaphor on the death of feudalism...
...None of these films is perfect, but all are interesting in their handling of the past, particularly past problems of war and dictatorship...
...To another group, it means never lose another to a Communist insurrection...
...He's half Indian and half German, we're told, and uses the former's bow and arrow with the latter's deadly efficiency...
...It only half-works...
...The children's school teacher (Matsako Natsume) tells the students that although their nation lost the war,' 'our souls are not occupied...
...The plot dramatizes their adjustment to the new, intrusive cultural seductions offered by the West...
...Secret Places is also provocative but flawed...
...Stallone displays mind (or primitive intuition) in perpetually outwitting the enemy...
...It stars Francisco Rabal (seen earlier in Nazarin, Belle du Jour, and Viridiana) as a tender cretin named Azarias, and Alredo Landa as Paco, Azarias's brotherin-law and a servant who is obsessively devoted to maintaining old loyalties...
...Indeed, what Stallone has brilliantly, almost perversely, done with this story is lift it entirely out of context to mate it with some potent, ongoing myths in American culture...
...The filmthe most riveting action adventure movie of the last half decade largely replays the war by using the character of Rambo that has replaced Rocky (1, II, or III) as a vehicle for Stallone...
...The Holy Innocents is a Spanish film on the "salt of the earth," especially one peasant family in the late Franco period who lives in semi-feudal obligation to the nobility in mountainous Estremadura...
...Rambo provides a hearty contrast of pure good vs...
...In the film Rambo describes their mood when he says he returned home from Asia to find ' 'another war against all soldiers...
...And, refreshingly, it focuses on girls, particularly the friendship between the German girl (Marie-Therese Relin, niece of Maximilian Schell) and her coltish, innocent, English protector (Tera MacGowran...
...One scene, in particular, stands out: when hunting, Paco's young master Ivan asks him to display his sure talent at finding snipe after the birds are gunned down by aristocrats hidden in blinds...
...In outline, the film provides an unusual angle on many neglected World War II facts, i.e., that some Germans resisted Hitler, that Western democracies sometimes resembled tyrannies in their treatment of refugee aliens...
...It should come as no surprise that "we get to win this one...
...The best of these foreign films is MacArthur's Children, a Japanese production about preservation of identity despite surrender...
...But Rambo is not much for context, which is exactly why it will win rousing cheers across theaters all summer...
...But it's stretching things to turn this replay of Vietnam into a wholesale victimization of American soldiers and no one else...
...A simple story like this called for a simpler mode of narration...
...the only way it could have "won'' was by devastating the country it was intended to save...
...He provides a new, topical embodiment of the populist Odd Man Out against the System with the System, this time, identified with the liberal left...
...As I recall, American methodology was hi-tech and highaltitude...
...There are two separate issues here missing and possibly abandoned U.S...
...The plot of First Blood II is for Stallone as Rambo to rescue some Americans in a Vietnamese prison...
...Rambo is a compelling synthesis of some old and new Commonweal: 374 heroic characteristics...
...It concerns the uproar caused in a rural English girls' school by the arrival of a German girl whose family has fled Nazism at the outbreak of World War II...
...In First Blood II, the sympathy due to a returning soldier is linked to the emotional issue of soldiers who haven't yet returned possible POWs still'' missing in action.'' (The fate of the POW has occasioned other recent films, Uncommon Valor, with Gene Hackman, and Missing in Action, with Chuck Norris, another no-nonsense primitive in the Stallone-Eastwood mold...
...Unfortunately, director Zelda Barron (a collaborator on If and Morgan) doesn't seem to know whether she wants to develop foreground or background, and ends by shortchanging both...
...TOM O'BRIEN 21 June 1985: 375...
...In arguing this, it becomes cinema's first "stab-in-theback" treatment of Vietnam, and a total inversion of such earlier anti-war films as Apocalypse Now...
...To be sure, soldiers are victimized in war...
...Whatever one's politics, on one level the film is hard to resist, which may make it all the more dangerous...
...Rambo also stretches things when it suggests that American soldiers could have won in Vietnam if allowed to fight like its hero...
...Postwar Japan is seen through the eyes of schoolchildren on an island in the "inland sea," as they react to the American occupation force...
...The acting is uneven: although the girls excel, the parents seem awkward, and references to a German son left behind a Luftwaffe pilot who informed the Gestapo of his father's dissent are used too frequently and lamely to pinpoint narrative climaxes...
...In the original First Blood, Rambo was a returning Vietnam vet, enraged at ingratitude back home...
...Secret Places is the kind of movie needed for the anniversaries observed this spring and summer, since to most American youth the past starts somewhere around 1984...
...With his bare physique and his Indian haircut and headband, Stallone crossbreeds Pumping Iron and Geronimo...
...Indeed, according to Rambo, ' 'I've always believed the mind is the best weapon...
...And in this it almost succeeded...
...Along the way to victory in Vietnam, Rambo beats up on prison guards, river pirates, Russian special forces thugs, one particularly sadistic colonel, and finally an American politico who commissioned the MIA search (for ulterior purposes) to begin with...
...Different nations take defeat differently...
...The Holy Innocents is rich in texture and character, but just not appropriately structured...
...As he says near the opening of Rambo: First Blood II, when he first hears of a new venture in Southeast Asia, "Do we get to win this one...
...But that's the extent of sympathy for the Southeast Asians caught in an awful mess...
...Veterans have asserted this loudly, especially in the last few months...
...There is one good Asian in the film naturally, a young and rather starlet-looking Vietnamese girl who provides the love interest...
Vol. 112 • June 1985 • No. 12
