Word: cimino
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Director Michael Cimino shoots a $30 million western...
...Angeles' Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, John Wayne himself came on. The old martial role model, looking gaunt but energetic, his stomach and one lung gone to cancer, presented the Oscar for Best Picture of 1978. It went to another Viet Nam movie, The Deer Hunter, Director Michael Cimino's story of young Ukrainian-American steelworkers from Clairton, Pa., who play pool, drink beer, watch football on TV, get drunk at a wedding, hunt deer and then go off to fight the war in 1972. It was the fifth Oscar for The Deer Hunter that night. The audience could only...
...means gone, of course. Outside the awards ceremonies, a remnant group of Viet Nam Veterans Against the War shouted protests about The Deer Hunter, which in style and message is a world away from Coming Home. The vets echoed the criticism of many old antiwar activists, who regard Cimino's cartoon treatment of the Vietnamese (played in the movie, incidentally, by Thais) as screaming sadists, much given to atrocity. Fonda called The Deer Hunter "a racist, Pentagon version of the war" -a judgment she reached without having seen the movie. Gloria Emerson, who covered...
...between the two films is that The Deer Hunter presents a version of the American experience in Viet Nam that is utterly at variance with the view, widely held among intellectuals, of barbarously overarmed Americans, a nation of William Galleys, doing battle against the frail, gentle, long-suffering Vietnamese. Cimino's victims are the rambunctious guys from Clairton, blue-collar heroes who took their wholesome patriotism to Viet Nam and there found themselves alone, morally adrift among savage Southeast Asian exotics who are forever forcing them to play Russian roulette. There is no record or recollection, incidentally, that...
...Cimino's tale may or may not be a bad description of what happened in Viet Nam; it depends on one's politics. It is the implication of American innocence that enrages some critics of the film. Partly the difficulty lies in trying to extrapolate a general statement of American performance in Viet Nam from the in dividual American stories that Cimino presents. The director, now working in Montana on a new film about the immigrant voyages west, speaks bitterly of Fon da's charges about his film. His characters, says Cimino, "are trying to support each...