The Deer Hunter (1978)

Cafe Society
1

I’ve always been somewhat of a fan of 70s American cinema. I appreciate the naturalistic style, realist themes and general sobriety that contrasts with the more lavish aesthetics of earlier and later periods. One good example of this is in the use of music: I utterly loathe the way film-makers like Robert Zemickis feel the need to over-emphasise every emotion with a syrupy, incessant soundtrack. On the other hand, even movies targeted at wide audiences like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or even Rocky, used little or no music to support the actors.

However fond of the era that I am, I never got around to watch one of its classics, The Deer Hunter, and it’s something I always regretted. Recently, though, my local video rental store received the letter-boxed DVD, which I promptly rented.

I was greatly looking forward to solid acting performances in a film about the impact of a distant war on a working class community. Somehow, I was aware it featured a game of Russian roulette, but knew very little of the actual plot.

Sadly, I was terribly disappointed. I found the film to be badly directed and badly edited. It was long and boring, and this comment comes from someone who loves slow movies in which very little happens. Wondering what others thought of the movie, I checked the comments on IMDB and found many defending the movie against charges of it being long and boring. However, I couldn’t help feeling people weren’t defending The Deer Hunter, but the movie it could have – or rather should have – been.

In one of the Vietnam scenes, when Michael (DeNiro) returns, there is a shot of a helicopter that has funky colour saturation that didn’t fit with the rest of the scene. It looked like it was either stock footage, or maybe a print mistake that made it into the DVD. What was memorable about it, though, is that it could have been taken out without affecting the movie at all. This was, IMO, the biggest flaw of the movie. There were just too many useless shots that didn’t advance the story one bit, didn’t add any new dimension to anything, and didn’t even provide any sort of visual satisfaction. This was painfully evident in the endless wedding scene.

I also had a very hard time suspending my disbelief a few times. An interesting fact about the Appalachians is that they don’t much look like the Rockies, for instance. More central, though, is the whole Prussian roulette theme. I can buy the POW camp scene, though I didn’t care for the heroic escape. The professional roulette player sub-plot, on the other hand, is sadly ridiculous. Even if you do accept that such clubs did exist, considering that the odds of you dying in a match are 50%, there’s no way I can buy Nick playing for what would have been several months. I’m sure there are plenty of people who suffered tremendously in Vietnam, and resorting to such an artificial plot device as the roulette clubs hurt the credibility of the movie. After Michael returns to Vietnam, I was left wondering just how easy is would have been for any old vet to find his way to Saigon just as the US was folding.

My favourite moment in the movie was when Michael returns home. He sees the “Welcome Home” sign and tells the driver to keep on driving and spends the night in a motel instead. This was exactly the sort of cinema I was looking forward to: a short scene that speaks a whole lot more than it shows. I feel that this is what Cimino might have been trying to do elsewhere, but unfortunately, I didn’t feel it worked too well most of the time.

I think I’ll reminisce about what I imagined the movie to be like instead of what I just saw. Oh well.

2

WHAT??? You didn’t like the hour long wedding scene? :rolleyes:

3

I agree; Deer Hunter was a bit sad, considering the wonderful material it had to deal with…

One nitpick - someone playing russian roulette has a 1 in 6 chance of surviving, not a 50%. And from what I’ve heard, those clubs did exist in Saigon. The guys who ‘played’ were just throwaways and usually drugged all to hell and back, the real money was in the punters betting on them.

How about a Special Forces soldier running around in uniform with that massive goatee - WTF? Or about how a SEAL-like dude would get caught during an attack on a village where he had a flamethrower and M-60 and boatloads of explosives as well as choppers landing all around him with fresh troops… killed, sure, but caught uninjured? I seriously doubt that. Also that the three would just be left in the river to die when they jumped out of the heli; that heli would have been back in ther dead quick, with gunship support, hosing down both sides of the river to keep Mr. Charles from getting to them.

I like that one; I also liked the one scene during the way too long wedding where the 3 drunked up lads try to talk war stories with the Airborne guy who’d just gotten back, and all they got in return was haunted stares…

4

I never thought The Deer Hunter was a particularly good film. The Russian roulette was an interesting metaphor, but the entire film was overblown and slow-moving and its message – War changes people – was obvious and trite.

Why did it get an Oscar?

  1. The academy was in the mood to recognize Vietnam as a subject for film.
  2. Everything about the film screamed “I’m dealing with Matters of Consequence,” which always attracts Oscar votes.
  3. The vastly superior Apocalypse Now didn’t come out until the next year (and didn’t win its own Oscar because the academy said, “Did that last year.”)
  4. John Cazale was in it.
5

I thought The Deer Hunter was a mess on many levels. Even when it came out, a lot of the reviews noted that the Vietnam scenes weren’t very realistic. I didn’t think the scenes set in the Pennsylvania hometown were realistic either. It’s just barely possible that a gang of friends just out of high school in the early 1970’s might all join the Army together. It’s harder to believe that it might happen if they were in their mid-twenties. The actors playing the soldiers were in their thirties, though. Deniro’s goatee didn’t fit the time or place. Their attitude toward Vietnam didn’t fit the time and the era either. I grew up in small-town Ohio and in the early 1970’s was in college. It’s possible that someone from a town like the one in the movie might still be gung ho about joining the Army, but they wouldn’t be as blind to protest against the war as these guys were. They didn’t ever seem to even imagine that the war was going to be anything but a chance for them to display their heroism. It’s conceivable to that a group of friends joining the Army in 1942 might have such pure, unadulterated enthusiasm about war as these guys did. But it would never have happened in the early 1970’s.

6

Not a big fan of the film either. The weird thing is that what power it does have with its characters gets lost if you cut that damned wedding scene. I can’t explain it it’s a mystery but the film works (when it works) better with it than without.

the film is over long and painfully slow at times with powerful moments that hint what it could be. Of course it is nothing compared to Heaven’s gate where our intrepid director tried to get lightening to strike twice with a long opening that has little to do with the main plot.

7

My post was terribly edited. I wrote:

> Their attitude toward Vietnam didn’t fit the time and the era either.

I mean something more like:

> Their attitude toward Vietnam didn’t fit the time and the place either.

8

I think the film is at its best when it’s taking its time exploring the character of a community, as well as the dynamics of individual characters within it. The wedding is a rather daring setpiece (obviously referring back to Visconti’s seminal The Leopard as well as anticipating Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander), but the execution is extremely well done. The problem is that people who aren’t used to that kind of pacing, or are waiting for the “war stuff” to start, quickly become impatient with this sequence, assuming it’s mere exposition, instead of the heart of the film in many ways.

And of course, the war stuff is hardly sustainable in-&-of itself, so it really needs that PA portion to have the kind of impact it hopes to. Cimino’s Vietnam never feels authentic and always comes across as the product of an imagination who wants to believe war is such-&-such with nothing to back that perception up.

But the acting is very good and Walken certainly deserved his Oscar, even though it went a long way toward typecasting him for future roles.

I always thought the best Vietnam film of the period (better than DH or Coming Home or the vastly overrated Apocalypse Now) was Go Tell the Spartans, which got zero Academy love and dramatically less success at the B.O., but packs a wallop of its own without showboating or delusions of grandeur and self-importance.

Having just sat through the near-4-hour Director’s Cut, you don’t know the half of it! :eek:

9

A one-in-six chance of dying on any given round. But with two people playing, and the game going until one is dead, and each player having the same chance of getting shot each round, then the odds indeed are 50% of surviving.

I went to the theater to see this movie when it came out. It was the first grown-up movie I saw (I was fifteen.) And I remember thinking that it was indeed long and too drawn out. But it was telling a story that was uniquely American in perspective, much like The Godfather did. And I think Cimino was cut a lot of slack because of the subject matter.

But all that rebounded on him when he released *Heavan’s Gate * a few years later.

10

I love long movies, too, but not badly edited long movies. Cimino should never be allowed to edit his movies. Awkward rhythms, gratuitous reaction shots, meaningless portent dragging most scenes out to be twice as long as necessary — and it all got only worse in Heaven’s Gate, which again had so much potential (and beautiful photography).

11

[Minor point]That scene was actually shot in Washington State in the Olympic Mountains which are around 7,000 feet. Unless a rapidly-growing volcano rose out of the ground in the past 24 hours, I don’t think there are any peaks in Pennsylvania near that height.[/Minor Point]

Your less-than-enthusiastic response to The Deer Hunter reminds me of a good quote by NY Times film critic Vincent Canby about the sudden rise and fall of Michael Cimino in his review of Heaven’s Gate. In it, he commented that Heaven’s Gate failed so completely that it seemed like Cimino had sold his soul to get the success of The Deer Hunter and that the Devil had now come around to collect.

12

It was really hard to find a copy of Heavens Gate in DVD-…but I watched it, and it was truly awful! I can’t imagine how Cimino got away with spending so much money to make such a pile of crap!
What I found ludicrous…he (Cimino) blew something very minor (the “Johnson County war”-in which perhaps one person suffered a cut finger), into a massive struggle between good and evil…in WYOMING!
Oh. and Kris Cristofferson proved that he cannot act!

13

Wooo, John Hurt is 20x worse than Kristofferson (who, actually, can act when so inclined).

For a not-altogether-unbiased, but thoroughly compelling account of the HG debacle, by all means read Final Cut, one of the best books ever written about the inner workings of the industry. Essential film reading.

14

I became impatient with this sequence and I wasn’t waiting for the war stuff. Slow-moving set pieces require tremendous talent to pull off and the terrible editing completely sinks this one in my opinion. Even in a very slow-moving film, every shot must bring something new. The wedding sequence is long because it’s filled with redundent shots. Pacing is perhaps even more important in slower scenes and that’s something that Cimino does very poorly, IMO. There were all the elements for a great build-up in that sequence – exposition of the triangle between Michael, Nick and Linda, Stanley loosing it, meeting the Green Beret. Unfortunately, like the rest of the film, Cimino can’t take those elements and put them together into something great.

I think it would have been possible to completely skip the Vietnam scenes altogether. It would have been a completely different movie, for sure, but maybe truer to its apparent intentions.

15

I agree completely with this. **Go Tell the Spartans ** is one of my all-time favorites, along with **Paths of Glory ** and the original version of All Quiet on the Western Front.

16

that wedding scene is the only way i can explain orthodox weddings to people who haven’t been to one. your arms get really tired holding a crown over someones head for 45 minutes.

other than the wedding i was rather “meh” on the movie.

17

Cattle rustlers Nick Ray and Nate Champion were shot and killed by the invading posse at the KC Ranch.

18

Old Goat drags out his soap box, squeezes into his jungle fatigues and begins his rant.

The Deer Hunter is the greatest war flick to date because:

The Russian Roulette sequences effectively convey the tension missing from all the other war flicks I have seen (have to admit, I haven’t seen many).

Each time before you go out, you must deal with the question, am I going to come back this time?

I believe it is the tension of wrestling with this question which ultimately alienates you from your close knit community (See wedding sequence).

What does it mean? What do we learn? Hell if I know. Wasted 5 years trying to figure that out myself. I do know, no matter how hard you try, you can’t go back to where you were.

19

So instead of conveying the tension of war by real battle scenes, The Deer Hunter conveys the tension by Russian Roulette scenes, which either never happened or were very rare? You know, the more I think about it, the more I think that The Deer Hunter is a great film . . . from another planet. Cimino was a great director of scenes that were impressive but which made me wonder if he had any acquaintance with the human race or the planet Earth.

20

FWIW, which probably isn’t much, while I also find The Deer Hunter to be poorly paced, it does closely capture the atmosphere and mindset of blue collar life in western Pennsylvania at the time. It’s a bit more depressing than reality, but other than that it’s spot on.

Also, I always thought the last scene was powerful in evoking a feeling of “we’ve been through some serious shit which only we understand.” Peter Jackson essentially remade it (though a bit lighter, thanks to Rosie Cotton) in one of the many endings to ROTK.