First Blood and Brian Dennehy’s Charming, Down-to-Earth Villainy

“The only way to do it is to grab the fuckin’ audience by the throat, shake the shit out of ’em and say, ‘You think you’re getting out of here alive? You’re not. Prepare to spill your fucking blood, because I’m gonna spill mine, and you’re coming with me.’”
—Dennehy, talking about the 2012 adaptation of The Iceman Cometh

“Character actor” is a term whose definition can be as expansive as the range of the actors it’s used to describe, but Brian Dennehy was an actor who immediately brought it to mind in his decades on the stage and screens large and small. Physically towering and intense, his lead roles tended to be wounded patriarchs and his supporting roles, even in his first appearances, had him playing cops, lawyers or other no-nonsense types.

Yet, within that fairly narrow typecasting, he revealed depth and vulnerability, always with a naturalistic touch and hardly ever leaving any toothmarks on the scenery. His turn as the villain in First Blood was his big break, but it was also emblematic of the more thoughtful nature of that first installment, before the series went into full-bore jingoism. Five films in, he remains the only villain in the series with even an iota of nuance.

Teasle: “If one of my deputies gets out of line with a prisoner, the prisoner comes to me with it. And if I find out it’s like he says, I kick the deputy’s ass—me, the law! That’s the way it’s gotta be. People start fuckin’ around with the law and all hell breaks loose!”

Sheriff Will Teasle (Dennehy) walks out of the precinct and pauses, framed against the gentle-blowing American flag, and then heads over to hop into his squad car, where he’s bracketed by the red and blue lights of the police cruiser and the purple mountain’s majesty towering over his small town. He is a paragon of American decency, backed up by the legitimacy of capital “D” Democracy. That the movie signals so clearly so early that it’s about such thorough disillusion is one of the most interesting things about it, and Dennehy’s character time and again illustrates it.

Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) drifts into town, wandering aimlessly in the knowledge that he is the last one of his elite group of Army badasses. Teasle singles him out for hassling, picking him up in his squad car and escorting him to the other end of town, for no reason other than that he doesn’t like the cut of Rambo’s jib. When Rambo quietly turns right back around and tries to head into town to get some food, Teasle’s immediate reaction is to escalate things.

Before anybody knows who he even is, the cops have roughed Rambo up and awakened his past trauma. The trouble is that unlike the many other un-charged detainees they’ve no doubt brutalized before him, Rambo isn’t so easily dominated. After beating the crap out of everybody in the station and fleeing into the hills, Rambo is hunted and nearly murdered by one of the most violent and heedless of Teasle’s deputies. When Rambo kills the guy in self-defense, Teasle of course throws all caution to the wind and leads a doomed manhunt into the mountains.

The most recent installment of the series, Rambo: Last Blood, also features Rambo Home Alone-ing some poor schmucks until only one hapless idiot remains to tell the tale. In this first film, he doesn’t actually kill any of Teasle’s men. The maiming he gives them, and the dire warning he gives to Teasle to back off, are the stuff of horror movies.

In town, Teasle is the law. He isn’t hunting Rambo because of any threat to the populace, or even to avenge his deputy. He’s doing it because he cannot abide the thought there is any place where he is not the law.