Has the News Got You Down? Try a Hollywood Rewrite

What if television programmers, instead of investing millions in recycled Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock, took a more careful reading of the country’s mood and simply combined the “high concepts” of this summer’s two film hits, “Back to the Future” and “Rambo: First Blood, Part II,” into a small-screen series?

It might be a great, if not original, idea. In the late 1950s, Walter Cronkite hosted a television series called “You Are There,” in which he travelled back in time to interview major figures at critical moments in history. This weekly format could be revived, with Sylvester Stallone single-handedly erasing some galling trauma out of America’s past.

Think of it: Rambo frees the hostages in Tehran; Rambo recaptures the Pueblo and the Mayaguez; Rambo knocks down the Berlin Wall; Rambo foils the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; Rambo catches Pancho Villa; Rambo saves Custer at the Little Big Horn; Rambo preserves the Maine and provides air cover at the Bay of Pigs (a two-parter). And don’t forget the Alamo, which would make a great season premiere. In the spirit of Lend Lease--and in gratitude for Masterpiece Theatre--we could even let the beleaguered British borrow Rambo, as long as they promised not to use him in the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812. They could certainly use him to bail out their boys at Arnhem, Dieppe and Gallipoli, not to mention the Light Brigade in the Crimea.

As for “future history” films, we’ve already made a strong start, by jingo. Remember “Red Dawn?” And in the upcoming “Rocky IV” Stallone pounds a Soviet boxer into hamburger, at once conjuring up the Olympic victory of the American hockey team over the Russians in 1980 and beating the drum for World War III.

The phenomenal box-office success of “Rambo,” with the attendant boom in Rambo paraphernalia (including Rambo dolls for Christmas) suggests that this movie has struck a resonant chord among frustrated, spoiling-for-a-fight, hero-starved Americans. Even President Reagan said after seeing the film that he would “know what to do next time” in the event of another hostage-taking.

Such a reaction from a former Army Air Corps Motion Picture Unit commando and veteran of “Hellcats of the Navy” is understandable, and not at all unprecedented.

Throughout the 19th Century, people around the world--in China, India, the Sudan and on America’s Great Plains--were periodically roused to rebellion by charismatic, mystical leaders who told them that if their hearts were pure and their minds resolute, they would be immune to the bullets of their enemies. Apart from some memorable massacres, the results of these uprisings were decidedly mixed.

In our century we’ve refined the art of subliminal coercion. Thousands of young Americans marched off to Europe and the Pacific, Korea and Vietnam, convinced by Hollywood heroes that war was a great adventure and that they were invincible, only to learn the truth about the stench and carnage of combat when they got there.

Many of today’s pre-adolescents who lined up to cheer Stallone, fashionably decked out in camouflage fatigues, may be ready to march off to Central America, equally certain that war is fun and that they, too, will return intact and covered with glory.

But, as cartoonist Jules Feiffer suggested some weeks back, why wait? If Rambo can retroactively retrieve our national honor in Southeast Asia, why don’t we just commission a similar celluloid comic book--also incorporating “Back to the Future”--about the Middle East?

In this version, Rambo goes to Lebanon and vicinity and blows all the bad guys to bits long before a bunch of American tourists pick up their tickets for TWA Flight 847.

Such a reel-life fantasy would certainly be preferable to our real-life reaction to the last Beirut debacle, when our marines were blown up in their barracks. The invasion of Grenada a couple days later sure did give us a lift. But how many left-wing flyspeck Caribbean islands are there before we have to hit the beach in Nicaragua?

History--the printed kind--suggests that even Rambo may be no match for Daniel Ortega.