With only one previous effort under his belt (the crime action pic Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), filmmaker Michael Cimino exploded on the scene with this epic three hour war drama, a huge box office success that won 5 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Christopher Walken) and Best Director (Cimino). Scuttling the conventional wisdom that audiences didn’t want to see movies about the Vietnam War, it opened the floodgates for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). Three Russian American Pennsylvania steelworkers (Robert De Niro, John Savage, Walken) celebrate on the eve of their departure for the Army. Once in Nam, the three are thrown into hell, captured by the Viet Cong. Forced to play Russian Roulette by their captors, they turn the tables, escape but are separated. Back home, De Niro must deal with his conflicted feelings about the girlfriend (Meryl Streep) of Walken, and decides to return to Nam after the military pullout to find his traumatized buddy.
“A big, awkward, crazily ambitious motion picture that comes as close to being a popular epic as any movie about this country since The Godfather. Its vision is that of an original, major new filmmaker.” – Vincent Canby, The New York Times
“A remarkably full screen treatment of the mystic bond of male comradeship… it’s an astonishing piece of work, an uneasy mixture of violent pulp and grandiosity, with an enraptured view of common life – poetry of the commonplace.” – Pauline Kael, New Yorker
“The Deer Hunter is said to be about many subjects: About male bonding, about mindless patriotism, about the dehumanizing effects of war, about Nixon’s ‘silent majority.’ It is about any of those things that you choose, if you choose, but more than anything else, it is a heartbreakingly effective fictional machine that evokes the agony of the Vietnam time.” – Roger Ebert
