No two stars better exemplify the 1980s/early 1990s than actors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.
Between them, their action movies came to exemplify cinema in the period of American excess and the reheated Cold War, bulldozering the New Wave of the 1970s out of cinemas in favor of crowd-pleasing bombast to the extreme.
Stallone had the “Rocky” and “Rambo” franchises, two film series that started out with highly acclaimed serious first entries before shifting to increasingly wild follow-ups that had their own kinds of pleasures. He also had his star-driven fun in “Cliffhanger,” “Tango & Cash,” “Demolition Man,” “The Specialist,” “Cobra,” “Daylight,” “Assassins,” “Over the Top,” and “Lock Up” and more.
Then you had Schwarzenegger. Breaking through with “Conan the Barbarian” and “The Terminator,” he went on to become even more of a brand than an actor, delivering iconic quips and full-scale action in “Predator,” “Terminator 2,” “Total Recall,” “True Lies,” “Commando,” “The Running Man,” “Eraser,” “Conan the Destroyer,” “Red Sonja,” “Red Heat,” and “Raw Deal” among others.
Both also had some mostly unfortunate attempts at comedies – including “Twins,” “Kindergarten Cop,” “Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot,” “Junior,” “Oscar,” “Jingle All the Way,” and “Rhinestone”.
As part of the recently launched Netflix docuseries “Arnold,” Stallone talks about his former bitter rivalry with Schwarzenegger. He says the landscape changed once Stallone’s “First Blood” hit cinemas:
“The 1980s was a very interesting time because the definitive ‘action guy’ had not really been formed yet. Up until that time, the action was a car chase like Bullitt or The French Connection, and a film all about intellect and innuendo and verbal this and verbal that.
[With ‘First Blood’] you actually relied upon your body to tell the story. Dialogue was not necessary. I saw that there was an opportunity ’cause no one else was doing this… except some other guy from Austria, who doesn’t need to say much.”
Schwarzenegger acknowledges that he was propelled to best himself and kept an eye on Stallone: “Every time he came out with a movie like Rambo II, I had to figure out a way of now outdoing that,” leading to the pair becoming “incredibly competitive”.
Stallone compared them to iconic fighters Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, or “great warriors that are travelling the same course: There was only room for one of us.” Ultimately Stallone says Schwarzenegger won in the end:
“He was superior. He just had all the answers. He had the body. He had the strength. That was his character. I had to get my ass kicked constantly, whereas Arnold, he never got hurt much. And I’m going, ‘Arnold, you could go out and fight a dragon and you’d come back with a Band-Aid.'”
Schwarzenegger pays back in kind, saying Stallone was a great motivator for him:
“Without Stallone, I maybe wouldn’t have been as motivated in the ’80s to do the kind of movies that I did and to work as hard as I did. I’m a competitive person.”
The two ultimately became friends, eventually teaming up on screen for the first time in 2010’s “The Expendables”.
Source: Deadline
