Word: deere
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Deer Hunter. The first film that tries to describe all the contradictions of American involvement in Viet...
Williams has no vision of deer and antelope, however. "We'll have ambassadors and citizenship," says he. "We'll put in a gambling casino and a TV station, and we'll register ships." He also hints at tax-free companies and Swiss-style secret bank accounts. What if the U.S. and Mexico interfere, as they surely will? "I'll take it right to the World Court," says Williams. "It takes them 20 years to rule on anything, and if worst comes to worst, I'll have my country for 20 years...
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...
...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 of Clairton, is absurdly repetitive. The portentous sequences of the men hunting deer back home turn a literary device into a crutch...
...film's ending, in which the major characters spontaneously sing God Bless America at a funeral breakfast, may give audiences some pause. The moment is powerful, all right, but does one laugh or cry? It is hard to do either. Like the Viet Nam War itself, The Deer Hunter unleashes a multitude of passions but refuses to provide the catharsis that redeems the pain. -Frank Rich