the story behind Rambo's First Blood blade

You might think that the one true star of the Rambo franchise is, well, the “lone wolf” himself, John Rambo. But for some fans, the Rambo film series, which now concludes with the release of Rambo: Last Blood, is more of a double-act: John Rambo and his knife. But being the tool of a one-man army, who during his cinematic wars has outfought an entire police force and national guard, liberated prisoners of war, and killed over 500 enemies of democracy, this is no ordinary knife.

Dreamt up by Sylvester Stallone himself and handcrafted by the late Jimmy Lile – AKA the legendary “Arkansas Knifesmith”, who also crafted knives for Presidents as well as movie stars – the original “First Blood Knife” was not just a survival tool, but an icon too.

It created a legacy in the Rambo series and beyond, and has reached near-mythological status with tales of “priceless” one-off models and never-seen-again movie set originals. “Stallone and Jimmy led the way for other knife makers,” says Jimmy Lile’s long-time friend and owner of Lile Knives, John Hill. “You can flash the silhouette of that knife anywhere in the world today and they’ll say, ‘That’s the knife of John Rambo!’”

An avid collector of knives himself, Stallone has since said that his intention with Rambo’s blade was “almost to make the knife into a character itself.” Jimmy Lile was one of the few knifemakers who could do it. Born in 1933 in Russellville, Arkansas, Lile worked in construction before starting a career as a knifemaker in 1970. The following year, he became one of the first two knife makers, alongside Bo Randall, to be listed in The Gun Digest, a Yellow Pages-like directory of hunting weapons. John Hill puts Lile’s skills down to his heritage and upbringing. “Jimmy’s grandmother was full blood American Indian,” Hill says. “She taught him how to sew leather. Being on the Arkansas River in Russellville, he was an avid hunter and fisherman. That’s how he started making knives – as a sportsman. He’d make them for his friends and himself.”

Sly met Lile in California, at store called Pony Express that sold Lile’s knives. “Stallone and Jimmy went way back,” says John Hill. “They formed a friendship, and in the early Eighties, Stallone called Jimmy and said, ‘I’m making a movie and I need a knife.’ This is how it came to be born. There were several prototypes. Sly knew just what he was looking for. He wouldn’t accept anything less than the ultimate of all movie knives.”

“He told me he wanted something different, something that everyone else didn't have. And that is what I made for him," Lile said in 1985. Lile also described it as a "knife to live with and not an offensive weapon." Indeed, the First Blood knife, as terrifying as it looks, is more a survival tool than hunting weapon. With Rambo’s kill count notching up literally hundreds of bodies in later movies, it’s easy to forget that in the original First Blood he only kills one person: a police officer whom he (sort of accidentally) knocks out of a helicopter by lobbing rocks skywards. 

The knife used for the movie is approximately 14 inches long, made with a stainless steel blade with 14 saw-teeth along the spine for cutting through wood, metal, meat or barbed wire. The handle is hollow, with a watertight compartment for keeping a survival kit inside – fishing wire, hooks, matches and other bits. The butt of the handle screws off, underneath which there’s a compass, and the blade guard has Phillips and flat screwdriver heads on either end. Wrapped around the handle is a green cord (“That cord’s actually for tying decoy ducks together,” says Hill. “It’s very strong… If you need cord, you need cord!”). The knife came in a leather sheath, which also contained a sharpening stone. 

In truth, it wasn’t an entirely original design. The popularity of the hollow handled knife is often credited to the “Model 18”, designed by Captain George Ingraham and crafted by father-son knifemakers Bo and Gary Randall. It was intended for helicopter pilots and crews in Vietnam, in case they needed to cut their way out of their own helicopters after being shot down.

But John Hill says that the First Blood Knife was “out of Stallone’s head more than anything,” with features that would play into the movie’s action. And it’s the knife that really kicks things off in First Blood. The film begins with Rambo being ushered out of the sleepy town of Hope, Washington for daring to have shaggy hair and a US flag on his jacket “Why you pushing me?” he mumbles at Sheriff Teasle, played by Brian Dennehy.

But when Teasle finds the knife on Rambo, he arrests him. Tortured by ‘Nam flashbacks, Rambo escapes the police, retrieves his knife, and flees into the woods for a full-blown war. He uses to knife to create traps – including a spring-loaded, heavily spiked log that nastily skewers one police officer’s legs – and ambush his pursuers. He kills a wild boar with the knife, and when his arm is badly slashed, sews the wound himself with the fishing wire stashed inside the handle.

As the legend goes, Jimmy Lile made 13 original knives, each serial numbered. Numbers 1-6 were used on screen and kept by Stallone for his private collection. But knife number 5 was given to costume designer Tom Bronson and went up for auction in 2013, selling for $90,000. 

Lile made another 87 knives to bring the original total up to 100, but tweaked the design, most notably to 12 saw-teeth instead of 14. Speaking to Blade magazine last year, Randy Rousseau, the world’s top collector of Stallone memorabilia, estimated that knives 7-13 would be worth between $50,000-$75,000, and numbers 14-100 between $15,000-$25,000. The remaining screen-used knives from batch 1-6, still kept by Stallone, are “priceless”.

For 1985’s First Blood II: Rambo, which saw John Rambo released from prison to rescue POWs still held in ‘Nam, Jimmy Lile crafted yet another knife, the First Blood II Mission Knife. This version was bigger, with black cord around the handle, and the middle of the blade painted black instead of matte grey (“In a combat situation, you don’t want any reflection!” laughs John Hill). For collectors, the Mission Knife is just as iconic as the first, and considered by Stallone to be the true “fan favourite”. Randy Rousseau estimates the screen-used versions are once again priceless, and the remainder of the original 100 worth up to $50,000 each. Lile also produced one-off versions of both First Blood knives for Stallone, engraved “Raven” in dedication to Rambo’s field name alias.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bo Derek were also collectors of Lile’s knives. But Hill describes Lile, who died in 1991, as more of a statesman than knifemaker to the stars. Lile produced knives for the Arkansas National Guard. He also designed, made, and presented knives for Presidents Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford, and then-governor Bill Clinton.

“There’s a picture of him at the presentation with Bill Clinton,” says Hill. “Both Jimmy and Clinton were from Arkansas… Jimmy was very conservative, Clinton was not. Not to get into politics but you can tell Jimmy was not happy in the picture. It speaks volumes. I keep a picture on my phone of Jimmy, his wife Marlyn, and Ronald Regan. Regan was an old cowboy and Jimmy kind of was to.”

But the First Blood knife remained a celebrity in its own right. The Washington Post reported a huge boost in sales of survival-style knives after the first two films. Blade magazine said that the Rambo knives had done "for the cutlery industry what 'Dirty Harry' did for the .44 Magnum pistol. Every man and his brother has to own one just like the one in the movie." Randy Rousseau has commented that the Rambo knife created an entire industry of collectors’ replicas and saved the custom knife business. “People started buying knives in the thousands once this knife was made,” said auctioneer Joe Maddalena when showcasing knife number 5 back in 2013. 

For 1988’s Rambo III – which sees Rambo head into Afghanistan to rescue his old ‘Nam pal Colonel Trautman – Stallone asked knifemaker Gil Hibben to create a new design. The Rambo III knife was a modified bowie knife that was even larger than the first two Lile knives, but with none of the extra features. A slot down the edge of its blade was originally intended to fit a second blade, which would have transformed it into a knife-axe hybrid, but producers rejected the idea. 

Interestingly, Hibben had first designed a knife that was much closer to Lile’s original, with a hollow handle wrapped in green cord, and saw-teeth on the spine. Known as the Rescue Mission Knife, it’s considered the “lost Rambo knife”. In something of a blooper, it’s used in the film, as a minefield sequence was shot with the knife before Stallone opted to use a different design, the Rambo III bowie, for the rest of production. For 2008’s Rambo – the most searingly violent and adrenalised entry into the franchise – Hibben designed a fourth knife, this time a machete-style chopper for cutting through the Burmese jungle as Rambo saves a group of aid workers from crazed militants.

Rambo’s knife influenced the entire action genre. Stallone commissioned knifemaker Herman Schneider to create the knife for Cobra, a half-knife-half-knuckle-duster (lined with eye-popping spikes, naturally) which was used by the film’s villain, The Night Slasher (Brian Thompson). Meanwhile, custom knifemaker Jack W Crain produced three knives for Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando – including the terrifying nine-inch LS-1, which has saw-teeth like Rambo’s – and a 20-inch machete style knife for Predator.

The friendly knife rivalry between Sly and Arnie continues – only this week Arnie posted a video mocking the size of a Mission Knife that Sly had signed and donated to a Cardiff charity, before pulling out one of his Predator machetes and joking “that’s not a knife” in his very worst Crocodile Dundee accent.

Crain also made knives for Die Hard, Road House, Demolition Man, and others – but his knives were always made for the films’ heroes, never the villains. “Knives have a bad enough reputation,” he told Blade magazine in 1986. “People associate them with street gangs and psychopathic killers in the ‘slasher’ movies. I don’t want to see my knives doing that sort of thing.”

Gil Hibben made another range of knives at Sly’s request for the Expendables films, including a 17.5 inch “Toothpick” and a whopping 19-inch custom bowie. More recently, Kentucky knifemaker Steve Auvenshine created an 18-inch, 2-pound blade for The Rock in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.

But not to be outdone by rival action heroes, John Rambo himself has continued the tradition with the fifth (and surely final) Rambo movie Last Blood. German knifemaker Dietmar Pohl produced two knives, the MK-8 and MK-9, AKA “The Heartstopper”. 

Lile Knives continues to produce display model replicas of both original First Blood knives, based closely on Jimmy Lile’s original design, priced between an eye-watering $1,995 and $2,495. Other replicas are also produced for the collectors’ market, but the quality, strength, and deviations from Lile’s design are a point of contention among the most dedicated collectors. In 2012, a replica was produced by custom knifemaker Andy Wood was described by one collector as “the most accurate First Blood Knife available” and was given the official Lile stamp. But with those first six original screen knives locked away in collections, it’s impossible to guarantee how close any replica is to the real thing. 

Like Rambo himself, the First Blood knife isn’t just the best of the best, it’s almost a legend. “Jimmy and Stallone were the forerunners,’” says John. “The success of the movie made the First Blood Knife what it is – most iconic knife of all time.”

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