Word: clairtone
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...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 guess at the complexities of feeling that ricocheted...
...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 the game was ever played during the American years...
...carnival of death even before brains are splattered across the screen. His portrait of South Viet Nam, from the infernal chaos of Highway One to the noisy decadence of Saigon, is no less harrowing. Throughout the film, Cimino draws visual parallels be tween the grimy blue-collar town of Clairton and the mess America created in Asia, until finally America and Viet Nam seem to share a single bastard culture. This surreal device reaches brilliant fruition when the film re-creates the fall of Saigon: in the holocaust the city starts to resemble a Western ghost town...
...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 of Clairton, is absurdly repetitive. The portentous sequences of the men hunting deer back home turn a literary device into a crutch...
There can be no quarrel about the acting. De Niro, Walken, John Savage, as an other Clairton pal who goes to war, and Meryl Streep, as a woman left behind, are all top actors in extraordinary form...