Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep, John Cazale, Christopher Walken, Jon Savage. Dir. Michael Cimino, Universal/EMI, 1978
Anyone who even knows about The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino's 1978 Vietnam drama, knows it takes almost half the movie to get to 'Nam. Cimino spends eons building the working class, Eastern Orthodox, steeltown world from which the principals come, establishing the traditions, the interpersonal relationships and dynamics of the characters, their illusions and ideals, pre-war. Ever since I first saw the movie on cable in the early '80s the 2nd-most controversial aspect, after the Russian roulette scenes, is how long Cimino spends building the US world relative to Vietnam. Some I know love it, others loathe it. I side with the lovers. I wish, years ago, I could have told them Cimino's reason for structuring the picture that way is simple, summed up in two words, one name. John Ford.
Ford was Cimino's favorite director. Even a few years ago, I knew so little about Ford I could never have guessed. Tonight, having seen 2/3 of Ford's Cavalry Trilogy, I said after a few minutes, "If Ford isn't Cimino's favorite filmmaker, I'll eat anything you say."
Wikipedia lists Ford as Cimino's second-greatest influence after Clint Eastwood, also a Ford acolyte, only because the list is alphabetical. I don't mean to blow my own horn. It's almost staggering how much the template Ford forged in Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande influences the first third of Cimino's epic, especially. Ford staged scenes of high drama, bitter conflict, and lowbrow humor in the first half of his Cavalry puctures, one often blending seamlessly into another, scenes of broad comedy flowing to sharp conflict and on to romance in just a few minutes. In one memorable sequence during Deer Gunter's wedding reception sequence, George Dzundza and John Cazale start out in a pantomime suggesting Cazale's date is enjoying her dance partner's company too much, Cazale separates the couple and slaps his date, a near-riot ensues, and Cazale and his date reconcile, all in about ten minutes. Whatever we think of the violence toward women, the sequence is incredibly effective in showing the personalities of characters and their interrelationships in a combination of broad comedy, conflict, and romance, all delivered sans dialogue, worthy of a scene featuring Victor McLagen in any of the three Ford pictures. If you're as much of a Ford fan as I, you'll understand why the first third to half of this movie gets me murmuring, "God this is good," well ahead of Vietnam and Russian roulette.
Still, Cimino does not remake any of Ford's films in The Deer Hunter. It could be considered a feature-length homage to any of the trilogy's episodes, in the same way Di Palma's Dressed to Kill and Body Double were feature-length homages to Psycho and Rear Window, respectively, while remaining very much their own movies.
If the rest of Deer Hunter follows Ford's thematic template, demonstrating how community and family shape the characters and how their loss affects them, it does so in a style more reminiscent of Eastwood or perhaps Eastwood's directorial mentors, Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, or even Sam Peckinpah. The violence is immediate and in your face. It's ugly and brutal and hard to watch, not glamorized or valorized. The Russian Roulette sequence's grime, tension, and grotequerie could easily come from one of Leone's westerns featuring Eastwood.
It's wrong of me, though, to say these influences define my love of The Deer Hunter. I first saw and loved the picture in 1983, before I knew Ford, Siegel, or Leone's names. Nor is The Deer Hunter nothing but a series of homages to other great filmmakers. It's an organic, fully realized, expertly executed story. Recognizing the influences deepens my preexisting love, it doesn't reconstitute it.
Cimino benefits from and takes advantage of the senibilities of his own era, particularly where violence is concerned. Even if John Ford conceived of a war picture which featured characters becoming addicted to playing Russian roulette, neither the Hays Code nor audiences of the time would have countenanced its mention, let alone depiction. Nor did Ford spend so much time depicting and examining the effects of war on soldiers, or how that pushes them from the community and family that shape them. (Something like How Green Was My Valley or The Grapes of Wrath do that moreso than Ford's war movies.) For all that Russian roulette defines so much of the second half it would be ridiculous to call it even a main point of Cimino's story. It's more the primary symptom of the characters' dissolution, of the divide they will all feel and experience in different ways once they return to Pennsylvania. Though Ford's films, particularly his westerns, examined incidents and figures in American history and their real-life significance versus their myth, as Cimino also does, the story of The Deer Hunter originates in Cimino and co-writer Deric Washburn. Though Cimino grew up Roman Catholic and the characters in Deer Hunter are Eastern Orthodox, Cimino invests the same sort of attention to detail in the opening sequences, particularly the wedding and reception, as Coppola does in the Godfather films or Scorsese in Mean Streets, vesting it with a sense of being a more personal film rather than a genre exercise. By the time the action starts, we're fully invested in the characters and their situations. That investment allows us to understand why Michael (DeNiro) skips his own welcome-home party, why Steve (Jon Savage) doesn't want to leave the VA hospital and reveal himself as a double-amputee, and why Michael risks his life to try to bring Nick (Christopher Walken) home as Saigon falls. The community, the family, and its integrity mean everything. Like the Cavalry pictures, Cimino says the only way forward from the war is as a family, however banged up and broken. The final scene, as Nick's friends eat breakfast following his funeral, drives the point home. They're lessened by one, none will ever be the same, and the future is unwritten, but they're facing it together. War kills human beings, not our humanity. Not, at least, without a fight.
Following his third feature, the Clint Eastwood-Jeff Bridges film Thunderbolt & Lightfoot, Cimino decided to gamble and direct only projects with personal relevance. A gamble made with studio money, it hit the jackpot with Deer Hunter but crapped out two years later with Heaven's Gate, one of the most famous flops ever, the film from which United Artists never recovered. Cimino directed another four films following the debacle, including the underseen Mickey Rourke crime epic Year of the Dragon, but critics and Hollywood never truly forgave or believed in him again. After 1996's Sunchaser he neither directed nor wrote another film. It's a sad end to a career which, even following Heaven's Gate, continued to show the kind of talent which made him a young director to watch in the 1970s.
If we follow a more conventional narrative and consider his career as effectively dead after 1980, however, we still draw an irrefutable conclusion, that from 1970 until 1980 Michael Cimino rivalled only Coppola and Scorsese for sheer, raw talent and vision. The Deer Hunter, unquestionably Cimino's masterwork, deserves recognotion alongside Fort Apache and a handful of others as a great film that manages to be both patriotic and anti-war in roughly equal measure.
Like many other legendary films I've watched over the last few years, The Deer Hunter more than earns its status as a classic. Next to Apocalypse Now, can there be any real debate it's the best Vietnam film Hollywood ever produced?
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