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March 1, 1987, Page 002021Buy Reprints The New York Times Archives

Films may not have the bloodlines that race horses do, but a hit has a way of leaving a trail. Its descendants are liable to be indirect, thanks to the singularity that makes it a hit in the first place, and to the riskiness of exact cloning (since the authorized clone is almost always a letdown, and the clone without the ''II'' in its title seldom stands a chance). So anyone who sets out deliberately to copy a hit will soon discover the elusive brilliance of the original, whether it's ''E.T.'' or ''Top Gun'' or a $100 million-grossing dance movie. But that doesn't mean that the hit isn't, in its own way, able to spawn.

Once a film is installed in the pantheon of popular culture, as ''Rambo'' surely has been, its influence will be felt in a variety of ways. Yes, there is a ''Rambo III'' in the works, but that's almost beside the point; it's the oblique influence that is more telling. Very soon after the original release of ''Rambo,'' another film showed a thin, bald man with a rag tied around his head, dressing up as Rambo for a costume party. It also became possible to send a Rambogram to a friend as a practical joke, delivered by some shirtless he-man with a knife in his teeth. At that point, the Rambo ripple effect had begun. And it continues. One of the few lonely jokes in the recent comedy ''Mannequin'' has to do with a security guard who has made ''Rambo'' the name of his bulldog.

Even in loftier circles, the aftereffects are still being felt. As was reported last week in these pages, academics across the nation are willing to examine Rambo's speech patterns, his body language, his politics and his resemblance to the President in an entirely serious manner. Someone has even taken the trouble to count the number of lines that Sylvester Stallone so laboriously mutters during the course of the film. Most of them aren't much longer than ''Yup'' or ''Nope,'' and even the aphorisms are conspicuously terse (''To survive a war, you gotta become a war''), but altogether, there are 163.

Of course, ''Rambo''-generated fallout can also be found on the screen. The hit's influence can easily be detected in ''Death Before Dishonor,'' which has a Marine hero and a Middle Eastern setting but still employs the Rambo one-man-band approach to foreign policy problem-solving. And the success of ''Rambo'' also colors ''Over the Top,'' Mr. Stallone's new saga of a triumphant arm-wrestler, even if the chief function of ''Rambo'' in this case is to cast a long shadow.

The ''Rambo'' influence can even been seen as playing some role in the box-office success of ''Platoon,'' though Oliver Stone's view of events in Vietnam could not be more different from Mr. Stallone's. Yes, ''Rambo'' was an action film of almost cartoonlike simplicity, whereas ''Platoon'' is a thoughtful, visceral work that leaves its audiences devastated. But ''Rambo'' may have helped pave the way, if not for the making of ''Platoon,'' then for its wide-scale acceptance.

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Had ''Platoon'' arrived in the pre-''Rambo'' era, it would certainly have been admired and respected, but it might well have been relegated to art-house status. ''Rambo,'' the first down-to-earth Vietnam blockbuster aimed directly at the solar plexus, may have helped convince the widest possible audience that the memory of Vietnam and the prospect of an exciting hit film were not mutually exclusive. And if the two films' caliber or attitudes are in no way comparable, they don't have to be. Just as ''Kramer vs. Kramer'' may have helped pave the way for the very different ''Terms of Endearment'' by making audiences receptive to emotionally wrenching parent-child subject matter, ''Rambo'' helped to create the climate in which ''Platoon'' currently thrives.

In that case, the effect is purely circumstantial, but no one could regard the overlapping of ''Death Before Dishonor'' with ''Rambo'' as a happy accident. Actually, the lineage of ''Death Before Dishonor'' is slightly more complicated, since it owes something to the ''Dirty Harry'' films as well, namely the specter of a tough-looking vigilante operating outside the law, supposedly for the sake of the community. But this established formula has been updated, thanks to ''Rambo,'' and given a more militaristic angle. So Gunnery Sgt. Jack Burns (Fred Dryer), assigned to the fictitious Arab nation of Jemal, sits still for the American-hating antics of local terrorists only briefly before striking out on his own.

The incendiary trailer for ''Death Before Dishonor'' fits more flying bodies (mostly in Arab headgear) into two minutes' time than most films pack into two hours. But the finished film is surprisingly tame. Although Burns does launch a one-man war, grudgingly teaming up with Israeli anti-terrorist operatives but still doing most of the dirty work himself, he somehow lacks gusto. Mr. Dryer's characterization is just as cold, nasty and humorless as any ''Rambo'' fan could wish, but there's an extra dimension that the character lacks. The greased biceps? The flaming bazookas? The special ''surivival'' knife (Rambo's ugly-looking instrument guaranteed to endanger the survival of anyone in its path)? Burns just doesn't have enough of a gimmick, and he doesn't have the crusading craziness that put Rambo on the map. Primitive as it was, ''Rambo'' had an intensity and personality that aren't easily matched.

That may well have occurred to Mr. Stallone himself in the wake of ''Over the Top,'' his latest stab at creating a new character, and a film apparently not destined (on the evidence of its so-so opening grosses) for box-office immortality. As Mr. Stallone knows better than anyone, ''Rambo'' is a tough act to follow. And as he must also know, in watching the ''Rocky'' saga as it wanes, a character like either Rocky or Rambo has a limited life span in the public consciousness, especially if the character's story can be told in its entirety the first time around. So Mr. Stallone continues to devise new vehicles for himself. And ''Over the Top'' is one of his strangest.

Directed by Menahem Golan, the Cannon Films executive who must himself be somewhat mindful of ''Rambo'' (Mr. Golan also directed ''The Delta Force,'' with Chuck Norris as more of a nice-guy vigilante), ''Over the Top'' is a film whose subtext is much more interesting than its surface. It presents the ever more glamorous, prosperous-looking Mr. Stallone - no wonder, since he was reportedly paid $12 million to do this - as a poor, humble truck driver named Lincoln Hawk. His two interests in life are his 12-year-old son Michael (David Mendenhall), who has been turned against his father by his mother's wealthy family, and the fine art of arm-wrestling. The film alternates bizarrely between arm-wrestling bouts and Mr. Stallone's own variation on ''Kramer vs. Kramer.'' It's never clear which of these is meant to be the real lure.

In his paternal capacity, Mr. Stallone is forced to do a lot more talking than Rambo does (a big mistake) and to play teacher and mentor. He instructs the boy that winning isn't everything, which is not the lesson of earlier Stallone films, and tells him he can win arm-wrestling bouts just by trying harder than his adversary. (Luckily, the film does not follow Michael's efforts to get through later life with that maxim.) Hawk also teaches his son how to drive his enormous truck illegally, which seems to be some small nod to the vigilante spirit. And he rails against his rich father-in-law in a heated custody battle. Finally, not because he seeks glory but because he needs money for a new truck, Hawk enters an arm-wrestling contest that pits him against the finest arm-wrestlers in the world. Since ''Over the Top'' is Mr. Stallone's baby, there's no need to guess whether the story ends in yet another triumph.

What's notable about ''Over the Top'' is the absence of Mr. Stallone's hit-making acumen, on which even some of his least attractive efforts have been able to trade. Poor trucker fights the establishment? An arm-wrestler claws his way to the top? A father fights for the love of his boy? It's all simple enough, but Mr. Stallone at his shrewdest has been even simpler. In the end, ''Rambo'' may be best remembered for such crude ingredients as its savage weaponry, bare-chested chic, primitive politics and tongue-tied understatement (''Do we get to win this time?''). It may be sooner rather than later that the sight of an oily, raging Rambo comes to look as sadly outmoded as a white-suited disco dancer on Saturday night. But for the moment, he continues to cast a very long shadow.

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