Written by: Michael Kozoll & William Sackheim and Sylvester Stallone

Directed by: Ted Kotcheff

BBD Comments:

One of my favorite picks thus far. ‘First Blood’ flooded me with memories. One of the nicest things about the presentation is that I don’t think I had ever seen it in wide screen, and it is such a broad frame that you really lose a lot of the film when it is cropped for television. Of the many surprises (David Caruso as a nerdy deputy) in the film, the biggest was how awful Richard Crenna is in the thing. I remembered his performance much more fondly than it deserved, and on total he is bad enough to gut the film’s third act.

But it is still a very interesting film in how it uses the Seventies anti-hero while at the same time presaging the Eighties penchant for reluctant hero caught in extraordinary circumstance.

This film really serves as a gateway through which the seventies tastes are transformed. Seen in the same setting as first ‘Rocky’ and then ‘Die Hard,’ ‘First Blood’ is truly connective tissue between the two disparate eras.

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