Word: conge
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...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 a beastly carnival of death even before brains are splattered across the screen. His portrait of South Viet Nam, from...
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...
...wagon at the border and then telling tasteless priest-nun jokes. There are the druggies, who ingest anything not nailed down. One woman snorts a whole plateful of Ajax and loves it. There is the half-crazy Vietnam veteran who suddenly has a psychotic fit and attacks the Viet Cong hiding in his house. There is the huge Chicano family, the black hustler. There is also the audience, which is falling asleep in the theater...
...antiseptic pedantry of Huntington's prose is almost numbing, but its meaning is anything but benign. Earlier in the article, he maintains that "...the Viet Cong will remain a powerful force...so long as [its] constituency continues to exist...
...bones knowledge of it. There are hints of an effort in this direction (Muc Wa contains a cemetery for the French troops who died trying to defend it, with an inscription about the Spartans at Thermopylae that provides the picture's title; there is a one-eyed Viet Cong sniper who appears and disappears in a ghostly fashion), but they are never really developed...