Word: viet
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Such is Cimino's fresh perspective that The Deer Hunter should be an equally disorienting experience for hawks and doves. This is the first movie about Viet Nam to free itself from all political cant. It contains no antiwar characters at all; its prowar characters are apolitical foot soldiers, not fire-breathing gook killers. The film is as far removed from Coming Home as it is from The Green Berets. Cimino has attempted to embrace all the tragic contradictions of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia...
...unquestioningly to fight for their country. In the film's first hour, set at home, Cimino presents his buddies sympathetically as average men with traditional values: their lives are defined by work, family, church and a love of sport. What happens subsequently to Michael and Nick in Viet Nam is a paradigm of what happened...
...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 a beastly carnival of death...
Perhaps Cimino's boldest move is the use of Russian roulette as a recurrent image. The game that we first see as a Viet Cong torture later shows up as a sport conducted by 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...
...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