Word: cimino
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lineup and probably the best movie of the year, The Deer Hunter, fully deserves to win the nine academy awards for which it has been nominated. The politics are terrible--Hollywood will never really deal with the ultimate horror of what America did to Vietnam. But Michael Cimino concerns himself more with what Vietnam did to America. He follows the lives of five Russian-American steelworker friends in a small Ohio valley town, while remaining largely true to actual events. This ground-level view is contrived at first--for instance, the actors are awkward and reckless with their guns...
DEWITT: Yeah. I think so. Cimino was trying to paint Vietnam as a moral hell, but he did so at the expense of an entire race. It was quite a feat to make all the "Gooks" look alike--they don't, you know. It's powerful as hell, but there are too many improbabilities, and it's very disturbing morally. I think it will do for the United States in Vietnam what Gone With The Wind did for the Confederacy in the Civil War. In some ways, The Deer Hunter may be the Gone With The Wind of our time...
Those contradictions are embodied by the movie's two principal characters, Michael (Robert De Niro) and Nick (Christopher Walken), steel-mill workers from Clairton, Pa., who go off unquestioningly to fight for their country. In the film's first hour, set at home, Cimino presents his buddies sympathetically as average men with traditional values: their lives are defined by work, family, church and a love of sport. What happens subsequently to Michael and Nick in Viet Nam is a paradigm of what happened...
...Cimino, 37, broke into movies as a writer for Clint Eastwood. After directing the promising Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, he spent four years on various scripts before joining forces with De Niro on The Deer Hunter. Here Cimino creates a portrait of the war that beggars logic and is boundless in terror. An early Viet Nam sequence, in which imprisoned Americans are forced to play Russian roulette by their Viet Cong captors, is one of the most gut-wrenching ever. With Peter Zinner's virtuoso editing, an agonizing sound track and Vilmos Zsigmond's fiery cinematography, Cimino creates...
...Perhaps Cimino's boldest move is the use of Russian roulette as a recurrent image. The game that we first see as a Viet Cong torture later shows up as a sport conducted by wagering South Vietnamese in smoky Saigon back rooms. Besides serving as an expressionistic picture of the capital's profiteers, the roulette game becomes a metaphor for a war that blurred the lines between bravery and cruelty, friends and enemies, sanity and madness. Unfortunately, other conceits in The Deer Hunter damage the film. A first-hour wedding ceremony, designed to establish the tribal rites...