Returning to the big screen next week is “First Blood,” the grim opening salvo of Sylvester Stallone’s iconic John J. Rambo character. The Rambo in David Morrell’s 1972 novel of the same name was a borderline psychotic killer who brought guerrilla warfare to the shores of the United States. Mr. Stallone, a savvier marketer, turned Rambo, a marginalized Vietnam vet, into a reluctant, noble warrior — and, in subsequent installments of the franchise, a metaphor for muscular U.S. foreign policy.
1. Archie Bunker — The personification of the white ethnic Reagan Democrat: Caroll O’Connor’s Arch clung to traditional values, however unfashionable they seemed to his progressive daughter and son-in-law. To Sen. Barack Obama, he might, indeed, seem “bitter.”
2. Frankenstein’s monster — Often mistakenly conflated with Dr. Frankenstein himself, novelist Mary Shelley’s 1818 allegorical embodiment of the unpredictability of modern science and technology is as pliable a social metaphor today as it has ever been. “Frankenfood,” anyone?
3. Woody Allen — The great comic writer-director has, at 72, become too old to play the “type” he fashioned in watershed satires including “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan”: the neurotic, navel-gazing, nebbishy wisenheimer. Attempts to hand over “Woody Allen” to younger actors, such as Jason Biggs (“Anything Else”) and Will Ferrell (“Melinda and Melinda”) have met with mixed success.
4. Rocky — Proving that a broken clock is indeed right twice a day, Mr. Stallone’s other great contribution to cinema has been embraced by soi-disant underdogs for 30 years, the most recent — and unlikely — being the once-inevitable presidential frontrunner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
5. Dirty Harry — In five movies over 17 years, Clint Eastwood’s San Francisco homicide detective, “Dirty” Harry Callahan, took on all the baggage of Americans’ fear of urban crime. Rightly or wrongly, Callahan’s “dirtiness” was code for restoring order, even at the cost of law.
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