Word: cimino
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Directed by Michael Cimino...
...uncharted psychological frontier. That is what happened in Last Tango in Paris, where Bertolucci used raunchy sex to challenge the conventions of romantic love; it is also what happened in The Godfather, where Coppola used gore to undermine the sanctities of the American family. Though imperfect, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter is as powerful as those bombshells of the early '70s. This excruciatingly violent, three-hour Viet Nam saga demolishes the moral and ideological cliches of an era: it shoves the audience into hell and leaves it stranded without...
...Such is Cimino's fresh perspective that The Deer Hunter should be an equally disorienting experience for hawks and doves. This is the first movie about Viet Nam to free itself from all political cant. It contains no antiwar characters at all; its prowar characters are apolitical foot soldiers, not fire-breathing gook killers. The film is as far removed from Coming Home as it is from The Green Berets. Cimino has attempted to embrace all the tragic contradictions of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia...
...feeling for the almost reflexive defenses of masculine camaraderie and for its excesses, with his eye and grudging affection for Western lowlife, Cimino has an obvious affinity for the work of Sam Peckinpah. What really animates Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, though, and makes it distinctive is its shellbursts of lunatic comedy. Thunderbolt and the kid hitch a ride with a crazy who has the exhaust pipe of the car channeled up into the back seat, a caged raccoon riding in the front seat, and a couple dozen rabbits stashed in the trunk. "What am I going to do with all these...
...friendship between Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is sentimentalized, and at the end, when invention gives in to a mawkish resolution. But all the performers are excellent, and Eastwood unwinds a little from his customary characterization of a terse, razor-eyed stranger, breaking through to a kind of boyish affability. Cimino himself renders most of the movie with enough cunning to make it one of the most ebullient and eccentric diversions around...