The Deer Hunter (1978)
Country: US
Technical: col/scope 182m
Director: Michael Cimino
Cast: Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Cazale, John Savage, Meryl Streep
Synopsis:
Three friends in a Pennsylvania steel belt town have their lives scarred by their experiences in the Vietnam War.
Review:
Perhaps by virtue of the fact that it was the first film about the war to make it to release (Coppola had started but not finished), Cimino's was the hot ticket in 1978, and it dealt with the subject sensitively and tangentially, focusing, in true New Hollywood style, on the lives of working class characters. Thus no one seemed to mind that an hour goes by before very much happens, the dialogue is hard to catch and by the time we go to Vietnam for the second time we have pretty much stopped caring. Sharing the Oscar headlines with Ashby's Coming Home, its handling of the war is visceral and incoherent, which we expect, but devoid of Vietnamese characters with whom to empathize. That, together with the concluding rendition of God Bless America (with none of the irony of Kubrick's We'll Meet Again) led Jane Fonda to opine that the film was racist and offered only an official history of the war. Our Russian immigrant blue collar characters, meanwhile, are raucous and inarticulate, yet full of love for one another, and the film clearly tapped into a nerve for the traumatised population at large. With hindsight it is possible to see signs of the legendary Cimino self-indulgence, but United Artists thought they had the mother lode and signed their future away on a profligate follow-up that would make Apocalypse Now look like a quota quickie. Its name..? Oh, you know.
Country: US
Technical: col/scope 182m
Director: Michael Cimino
Cast: Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Cazale, John Savage, Meryl Streep
Synopsis:
Three friends in a Pennsylvania steel belt town have their lives scarred by their experiences in the Vietnam War.
Review:
Perhaps by virtue of the fact that it was the first film about the war to make it to release (Coppola had started but not finished), Cimino's was the hot ticket in 1978, and it dealt with the subject sensitively and tangentially, focusing, in true New Hollywood style, on the lives of working class characters. Thus no one seemed to mind that an hour goes by before very much happens, the dialogue is hard to catch and by the time we go to Vietnam for the second time we have pretty much stopped caring. Sharing the Oscar headlines with Ashby's Coming Home, its handling of the war is visceral and incoherent, which we expect, but devoid of Vietnamese characters with whom to empathize. That, together with the concluding rendition of God Bless America (with none of the irony of Kubrick's We'll Meet Again) led Jane Fonda to opine that the film was racist and offered only an official history of the war. Our Russian immigrant blue collar characters, meanwhile, are raucous and inarticulate, yet full of love for one another, and the film clearly tapped into a nerve for the traumatised population at large. With hindsight it is possible to see signs of the legendary Cimino self-indulgence, but United Artists thought they had the mother lode and signed their future away on a profligate follow-up that would make Apocalypse Now look like a quota quickie. Its name..? Oh, you know.
Country: US
Technical: col/scope 182m
Director: Michael Cimino
Cast: Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Cazale, John Savage, Meryl Streep
Synopsis:
Three friends in a Pennsylvania steel belt town have their lives scarred by their experiences in the Vietnam War.
Review:
Perhaps by virtue of the fact that it was the first film about the war to make it to release (Coppola had started but not finished), Cimino's was the hot ticket in 1978, and it dealt with the subject sensitively and tangentially, focusing, in true New Hollywood style, on the lives of working class characters. Thus no one seemed to mind that an hour goes by before very much happens, the dialogue is hard to catch and by the time we go to Vietnam for the second time we have pretty much stopped caring. Sharing the Oscar headlines with Ashby's Coming Home, its handling of the war is visceral and incoherent, which we expect, but devoid of Vietnamese characters with whom to empathize. That, together with the concluding rendition of God Bless America (with none of the irony of Kubrick's We'll Meet Again) led Jane Fonda to opine that the film was racist and offered only an official history of the war. Our Russian immigrant blue collar characters, meanwhile, are raucous and inarticulate, yet full of love for one another, and the film clearly tapped into a nerve for the traumatised population at large. With hindsight it is possible to see signs of the legendary Cimino self-indulgence, but United Artists thought they had the mother lode and signed their future away on a profligate follow-up that would make Apocalypse Now look like a quota quickie. Its name..? Oh, you know.