The Deer Hunter Legacy Series Edition The Deer Hunter Universal 1978 / Color / 2:35 anamorphic 16:9 / 182 min. / Street Date September 6, 2005 / 26.98 Starring Robert De Niro, John Cazale, John Savage, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep, George Dzundza Cinematography Vilmos Zsigmond Art Direction Ron Hobbs, Kim Swados Film Editor Peter Zinner Original Music Stanley Myers Written by Michael Cimino, Deric Washburn, Louis Garfinkle, Quinn K. Redeker and Deric Washburn Produced by Michael Cimino, Michael Deeley, John Peverall, Barry Spikings Directed by Michael Cimino
	Reviewed by Glenn Erickson The Deer Hunter is perhaps due for a re-consideration. It was a shoo-in in 1978 for a number of easily defined reasons. It was the first major revisionist look at the Vietnam War and its effect on the working-class generation back home. It was epic in scale and ambition and a real 'director's movie.' From this vantage point 27 years later, its stellar cast seems more impressive than ever. Besides another step in the evolution of Robert De Niro, four other important actors of the 80s and 90s received a big career boost from this show. Synopsis: Young Pennsylvanian steelworkers Michael Vronsky, Steven and Nick (Robert De Niro, John Savage and Christopher Walken) charge off to war after Steven's wedding to his pregnant sweetheart Angela (Rutanya Alda) and a quick weekend of hunting. Years and battles later, the three are united as prisoners of the Viet Cong, and forced by their captors to play a perverse game of Russian Roulette. Simply surviving appears to be impossible, but the mental trauma is even worse. The Deer Hunter is a film of considerable virtues that go beyond being the right film at the right time and winning a tall stack of industry awards. For acting, atmosphere and general realism the film gets very high marks. We invest considerable emotion in the characters, some of which is repaid handsomely. The interesting steel-town setting with its Russian Orthodox neighborhood is shown in absorbing detail, yet our attention is firmly focused on just two or three characters. Most of the opening hour is devoted to a jubilant wedding celebration. We get to know the character of our working-class heroes without learning most of their last names. That extended opening is followed by a jarring cut to a harrowing Vietnam sequence, a ragged jumble of brutality and torture. A brief, frantic horrorshow of combat is followed by a suspense sequence that forms the thematic center of The Deer Hunter - Russian Roulette. As if adopting the game's suicidal madness as a lifestyle, one of the friends keeps playing it afterwards for profit, as Saigon collapses around him. The Deer Hunter has what many 70s movies were lacking: Heroic characters fighting and suffering for friendship, honor, love and patriotism. All three of them walk through fire but only one comes out the other side as a whole person; Vietnam is seen, fairly enough, as a place of physical and psychological scarring. The film also celebrates life back home, which may be crude and rude but also includes honest work in the steel mill and a grateful home-town girl waiting for one's return. Even a marriage shattered by disability looks as if it will make a comeback. Savant saw the film new in 1978 and had a different reaction. I agreed with the basis of the story on a personal level, but everything else about Michael Cimino's 'important film' seemed wrong. It was a reaction to the film's ideas and the lessons it taught, and not just a rejection of its 'uplifting' ending. I still react the same way - The Deer Hunter slickly pushes the same old blather about honor and presents a story that grows increasingly pretentious. Michael Cimino's calculated direction starts off the show beautifully, with a captivating slice-of-reality ethnic wedding. Then he makes directorial noises that both give away his game and reveal how little he has to say. The wedding party is obviously calculated to outdo the opening reception in The Godfather. It goes on and on for its own sake, reels of non-narrative joy. Just when we think that Cimino has grasped the lessons of Visconti and The Leopard, he shows how shallow he really is. The bride and groom Steven and Angela are told that if they drink from a goblet without spilling, their life will be happiness. Cimino cuts to the tiny detail of little drops of wine staining her dress, and the screen screams out 'symbol! symbol!' All of the build-up for finding meanings in ambivalent behaviors is lost. From then on, it's as if Cimino is scoring points, not telling a movie.  1 As is typical with most 'honest, emotional' accounts of war, The Deer Hunter turns out to be more old-fashioned than supposedly old-fashioned pictures like The Four Feathers. Buddies go off to war with dreams of glory. Some make it and some don't, but the ideal of glory in War is upheld. No matter how strongly the film says that anybody could crack up, we're encouraged to see that some guys are just more heroic than others. One fellow becomes a (rather exotic) mental case because of the strain. Another is ground down by the pressure and trauma. As we identify so closely with them, our loyalties go immediately to the survivor, the man of action who answers brutality in kind and can make horrible but necessary decisions under pressure, for both himself and others. In other words, one soldier out of three has the right stuff, and the other two get what they get because of their basic characters. Not us. We stay with the main hero, and return with medals, a snappy ranger beret and a license to bed willing Meryl Streep. In other words, this 'progressive' war movie is the old BS in a different package. The tough survivors are the real men, and the others had unfortunate but fatal weaknesses. The Vietnam sequence is the strongest in the movie. Cimino throws us into the action and not allowed to get our bearings. Jarring discontinuities jump us ahead in the story, forcing us to fill in a lot of blanks, fast. Years have gone by and the three are seasoned soldiers. Michael (De Niro) has turned into Hawkeye Of The Rice Paddies, or The Man With No Dog Tags. His outfit apparently wiped out, Michael plays possum until a Viet Cong is distracted by the act of shooting a civilian woman and her baby. Then Michael grabs a convenient flame thrower and incinerates him. We see a glimpse of what might be pigs fighting over and devouring the baby's body. It's all too fast to tell for sure. Then time stands still for the next extended scene, the forced Russian Roulette in captivity. The Deer Hunter seems to want us to think that RR was the rage in Vietnam, both among the V.C. and in secret betting parlors back in the slums of Saigon. The unbearable tension in this scene was too much for many viewers; I can remember feeling the adrenaline rise in a packed preview audience. It's personally threatening, and after one has crossed a certain unmarked threshold of emotional acceptance, details of credibility don't count. The Deer Hunter's narrative drive has so far been maintained by keeping us off balance and under-informed. But from here on in the lack of substantial exposition works against Cimino. Unanswered questions build up until events become absurd. Michael's final return to Vietnam makes little or no sense on any level but wish-fufillment. Things we ask ourselves: Why does nobody worry about stray bullets in these games of RR? All we see are a couple of bystanders leaning a bit when the gun is pointed in their direction. Why would the Viet Cong for a single moment permit one of their enemy to take hold of a loaded weapon? (SPOILERS) Why does straight-shooting pragmatist Michael attend the illicit RR game in Saigon, which we are led to believe carries an inordinately high cover charge? Doesn't it strain believability that he happens to go the same night Nick comes by? (SPOILERS) Why doesn't Michael find out what happens to his buddies, to whom he is so obviously dedicated? One is clearly evacuated in a chopper, with a leg wound. The other is last seen riding a jeep back to U.S. territory. By his elevation in rank it looks as if Michael goes right back into service. Back home, why is Michael shocked to find out that Steven is alive and returned? How can he possibly return to 'Nam? Is he in or out of the Army when he does? Does a longer version answer these questions? None of these questions would be relevant if The Deer Hunter were giving us something substantive on other levels. But what we're fed is mostly symbolic pap. We've already established Hawkeye, I mean Michael as a true hunting spirit of the woods, a superior man reared in a steel mill but possessed of the gentlemanly graces to charm Meryl Streep's golden goddess of the supermarket. Now he goes out on another hunting trip. Cue more noble Russian choir music as the godlike hero communes with the cloudy mountaintops. He's attained a higher level of wisdom, see, and lets the mighty stag go in peace - just the kind of ennobling fable that gives war a purpose. It's pap, I tells ya, the kind of ur-superman stuff that Leni Riefenstahl helped preach in pro-Aryan mountain climbing movies. This doesn't want to be as provocative as it might sound, but had the Nazis conquered the world, and saw the need to make a feel-good movie about how tough it was to eradicate all those 'stubborn lower races' on other continents, it might have a few things in common with The Deer Hunter. Being an unwilling warrior who does his duty, why, what man's destiny could be greater? Deric Washburn's script wants us to accept Russian Roulette as a metaphor for the Vietnam experience, an idea that gets way out of hand. Resolute in its desire to stay personal and avoid politics, The Deer Hunter takes RR as representative of what our boys had to go through, at least on a spiritual level. How this adds up I don't know. The ultimate statement seems to be that Vietnam is Evil and that everything the soldiers experience is the fault of Southeast Asians. The Cong are subhuman brutes and the corrupt colonial French invite us to get in over our heads. The prostitutes solicit us, against our will, naturally. It's only our superior spirit and luck that enables us to go for years (!!) playing Russian Roulette. We not only survive, but amass a fortune to send back home.  2 The definitive answers to all this are probably in print somewhere, but Savant can't help but think that the Russian Roulette motif in The Deer Hunter is related to that famous newsreel shot of the South Vietnamese police officer executing a suspected Viet Cong with a gunshot to the head, the one with the fountain of blood similar to the effect seen here. The footage is a key image in the antiwar documentary Hearts and Minds. In all fairness, The Deer Hunter does have a hint of equal-opportunity atrocities. The Viet Cong are shown only as savage killers enamored of gruesome and inhuman tortures, but when the boys are in the river we're given a glimpse of a helicopter flying overhead with somebody clinging on underneath. Is airborne rescuing somebody else, or do they happen to be in the vicinity because they're having fun murdering captured V.C. by dropping them from great heights? For its ending the picture dissolves into emotional mush. All the crude and rude types are humbled and brought to tears by a funeral, until we have a 'spontaneous' sing-song of God Bless America. Despite the solid attempt by the cast to make it work, it's still using 'the patriotism card' to bring down the curtain. All the old themes have been recycled in new wrappings, but it's still an empty enterprise. The Deer Hunter is really an American version of a German Heimat (homeland) film, one that posits rural and conservative values as meaningful and worldly and intellectual concerns as an illusion. The cast of The Deer Hunter seem ready to return to their jobs (while those jobs still exist - the outside world will impinge eventually) and forget about everything else. F___ the war and let's have coffee and scrambled eggs. The Deer Hunter still dazzles with its performances. The actors create the characters out of whole cloth, and Cimino's fluid direction finds an excellent balance between stand-here-do-this blocking and naturalistic improvisation. John Cazale is excellent at portraying a whining sad sack, the weakest and least principled of the group - it's a shame that he only seemed to play this kind of character in films. Christopher Walken is intelligent but also vulnerable and reasonably sensitive - it seems sort of a cheat that his transformation from human to zombie is glossed over so quickly. He carries the story's most difficult role and barely makes it work. Meryl Streep is the local gem one finds behind lunch counters or otherwise buried in small towns, often quite happily. The one-two punch of this film and TV's Holocaust put her way up front in the list of hot actresses. She mostly rides the film out with her poise and disarming smile; we have a hard time with the character every time she's asked to convince us that her Linda isn't very bright. Everything about Streep projects intelligence. De Niro carries the lead role with quiet dignity. The part does most of the work and he just has to stay on top of it. The 'youthful exuberance' of running through the streets naked now seems like a stunt, and De Niro's attempts to give Michael an unyielding downside don't work too well either. When he browbeats and chastizes the lamely infantile Stosh (Cazale), we have to conclude that Michael is a natural leader granted right of judgment over his buddies - even to the extent of pulling the trigger on poor Stosh to teach him a lesson. George Dzundza and Chuck Aspergren fill out the roster of small town buddies. Rutanya Alda has considerable screen time overjoyed in the first half and depressed in the second. Shirley Stoler (The Honeymoon Killers) turns a dozen closeups into an interesting fringe performance. Look sharp to catch a few glimpses of the charming Amy Wright (The Accidental Tourist) as a spirited bridesmaid. Universal's Legacy Series Edition of The Deer Hunter finally presents the show in an acceptable video version. Savant had given up on the title in the 1990s -- every transfer, even laserdisc versions, looked terrible. I saw a bit of at least one DVD that wasn't much of an improvement. This edition is an excellent opportunity to check out the celebrated picture and form one's own opinion. The year after Cimino's film came out, fans of Apocalypse Now complained that it didn't get Best Picture because it was preceded by a Vietnam war Oscar winner. Coppola's phantasmagoria is a lumpy and politically-charged puzzle with its own pieces missing, but it did what The Deer Hunter only pretended to do, and that's say something coherent about the War. The Deer Hunter is of course also known as the success that launched Cimino's Heaven's Gate. That debacle is singlehandedly credited for bringing down a studio and killing off 70s adult 'director's movies' in favor of the Spielberg-Lucas toyland and the corporate pablum we get today. The two-disc set is thin on extras, but the three-hour film has happily not been bit-compromised by trying to jam too much on one disc. The feature is accompanied by a commentary with film Journalist Bob Fisher and cameraman Vilmos Zsigmond. Zisgmond's communcation skills have improved since the 1970s and he says a lot worth hearing, once one gets beyond his raspy voice. Thankfully, he does talk about more than just how each scene was shot from a camera point of view. As has been reported elsewhere, we find out that the Pennsylvania mountains were really filmed in Washington State. Disc two has almost nothing on it. A misleadingly titled 'deleted and extended scenes' extra is instead a selection of a few (very long) alternate camera takes in workprint form. It drags on quite a bit, showing us some moments that are obviously first tries before the actors have fully warmed up. A trailer with bad color and some press-release text production notes are it for the extras. It looks as if other material fell through at the last minute. Amazon.com still lists two items not included on the disc: Acceptance of Best Picture Award and Anatomy of a Scene. The disc comes in a handsome and durable 'little Golden Book' package that promises a lot more. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, The Deer Hunter rates: Movie: Very Good with reservations Video: Excellent Sound: Excellent English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo) Supplements: Audio Commentary with Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, Deleted and Extended Scenes, Trailer Packaging: 2 discs in heavy plastic and card Book form Reviewed: August 28, 2005 Footnotes: 1. An identical thing happens in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Two characters argue back and forth, and we notice that on a desk in the foreground is one of those conversation-piece toys, the rack of brass balls that clack back and forth. They seem to mirror the argument, and seen out of the corner of one's eye, are a relevant comment on the scene. But then Peckinpah ends the scene by cutting to a closeup of the clackers. All ambiguity is wiped away when the director makes the point obvious. In The Deer Hunter the drop of wine changes the whole direction of the show. Stop looking for the answers, folks, it'll all be spelled out for you. Return 2. For criminy's sake, if Nick (Walken) is so insensate about reality and suffering amnesia about anything to do with home, Michael, Linda or Steven, WHY is he sending money back to Steven? Is this all answered in Cimino's four hour cut? Note 8:30:05: Savant has heard from two people about this issue. There's a Region 2 disc of The Deer Hunter with a commentary by Cimino and F.X. Feeney. It points out that the reason Nick has sent money to Steven is that Nick is the father of Angela's child. At the end of the wedding sequence Mike and Stosh argue over some unstated fact, while Steven drunkenly states that 'he's never touched Angela,' as if he's the only one in town who doesn't know that she's pregnant. This entire issue is not only undramatized, it remains underwater (so much so that Savant promptly forgot about it). It doesn't change my logic above - Nick seems to have a very selective memory of his friends and his life back in America. He doesn't even recognize Mike, but he's addressing envelopes of cash every month. I suppose to some this might be a subtlety indicating riches to be mined just under the surface of the movie. I say the whole subplot is just buried, and might as well not be there. The Deer Hunter is a gripping movie, but there's a point where information withheld from the audience just plain gets in the way of telling a story. Return Email responses: 8/31/05: I read your review of The Deer Hunter and...wow! Even the pros miss the boat once in a while I suppose. You really went out of your way in looking for problems with a seminal film that best exemplified what truly great movies do to us all - create an unforgettable emotional viewing experience. You trashed this film because of an unability to relate to the folks being depicted, the experience of war, the era, the ethnicity in this rural mining town -- wow! Hopefully, Universal doesn't ask you to write any liner notes for this one. -- (Unsigned) 9/01/05: Dear Savant: Enjoyed your review immensely. Best assessment of this film I've seen. It bombards the viewer with strong images and half-baked ideas primarily to elicit emotions - any emotions. Its points are so vague that it's easy for those on both sides of the war to respond to it. I remember John Wayne smiling sincerely when he announced it as the Oscar winner. It belongs with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, E.T., Forest Gump, etc. as one of those films that invite the viewer to read whatever he wants into it. It also bothers me when De Niro arrives during the fall of Saigon and charges blindly through the chaos, completely ignoring the human pain around him. He is there to rescue his friend; nothing else matters. But what kind of person does this make him? Deer Hunter also offers one of my favorite awful lines. De Niro keeps insisting that Savage leave the vets' hospital; Savage keeps refusing; but when De Niro begins pushing his wheelchair, Savage utters the immortal line "Do what your heart tells you." I've used this line ironically hundreds of times since. I shouted it when I saw Savage at a screening at the 92nd St. Y, but he was too far away to hear me. -- Michael Adams 9/01/05: Gee its hard to understand your review, first you say you like it, then you hate it. I don't agree at all, sure it's not perfect (no film is) This is more than impressive. Not only does this movie have what a lot of writers want, story and characters you care about, didn't it win the critics award? Proof of that. It has something most films simply don't, great visuals that are so much better than the run of the mill Hollywood (or European for that matter) film even in the wonderful 70's (Granted there is Days of Heaven which is even better). The Shot of Michael's caddy spinning around to stop at the bar is one of the most amazing shots in film history :) -- Peter 9.02.05: (slightly edited) Thanks very much for your typically thoughtful review of The Deer Hunter. It's been years 27 years since I saw the thing in the movies and was stunned to realize that, apparently, I was the only one in the audience who had found the entire russian roulette episode a steaming heap of racist s---; there is nothing to suggest that this practice ever occurred in Viet Nam (now, in Iraq...) ... and it wins the Oscar for best director/picture. If it had been intended as metaphor, it ought now to be remembered that the U.S. was able to do what it did in Viet Nam for all those years because we were doing it to (common racist names for Asian enemies deleted); the mass audience that would watch was hardwired to believe that this was denoting historical fact (they don't have the same respect for human life that we do/life is cheaper there). I haven't seen the movie since it came out - with the fine cast, perhaps I'd like it more now than then. But I don't wanna watch. I'm too busy with our new enemies the (common racist names for Arab enemies deleted) and whatever else the armies of the night are calling the Occupied. You know, the ones who don't respect human life as much as we? Now. I'm afraid to ask, but did you see the teeniest tiniest bit of right wing slamming of social/peace activists, drug users, hippies and anyone not-on-board in Forrest Gump? It's the only film I've ever seen that actually has a character pay for her moral shortcomings with AIDS. Even if you liked the movie that I've hated since I saw it, I'd like sometime to read your thoughts concerning it. These two join Titanic and Rocky in the running for BEST of the Best Pictures - Skank category. Didn't mean to run on so, but your review inspired me. Your writing is good enough so that you should someday be able to quit your day job! Thanks again! -- Steve Shuttleworth [Savant Main Page] [Savant Links] [Article Index] [Review Index] [Savant 5 Year Report] DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2007 Glenn Erickson Advertise With Us Review Staff | About DVD Talk | Newsletter Subscribe | Join DVD Talk Forum Copyright © DVDTalk.com All rights reserved | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use