Word: cimino
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...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...
...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...
...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...