One of several 1978 films dealing with the Vietnam War (including Hal Ashby's Oscar-winning Coming Home), Michael Cimino's epic second feature The Deer Hunter was both renowned for its tough portrayal of the war's effect on American working class steel workers and notorious for its ahistorical use of Russian roulette in the Vietnam sequences. Structured in five sections contrasting home and war, the film opens in Clairton, PA, as Mike (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Stan (John Cazale, in his last film) celebrate the wedding of their friend Steve (John Savage) and go on a final deer hunt before the men leave for Vietnam. Mike treats hunting as a test of skill, lecturing Stan about the value of "one shot" deer slaying and brushing off Nick's urgings to appreciate nature's beauty. As Mike ruminates post-hunt, the film cuts to the horror of Vietnam, where the men are captured by Vietcong soldiers who force Mike and Nick to play Russian roulette for the V.C.'s amusement. Mike turns the game to his advantage so they can escape captivity, but the men are permanently scarred by the episode. Steve loses his legs; Nick vanishes in the Saigon Russian roulette parlors. Mike returns alone to Clairton a changed man, as he rejects the killing of the deer hunt and finds solace with Nick's old girlfriend Linda (Meryl Streep). Disgusted by the antics of his male cohorts at home, Mike decides to bring Steve back from a veterans' hospital, and he returns to Saigon to find Nick. As Saigon falls, Mike discovers how far gone Nick is; the survivors gather in Clairton for a funeral breakfast, singing an impromptu rendition of "God Bless America." ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
In der
kleinen, dreckigen Industriestadt Clairton, irgendwo in Pennsylvania, feiern
die Freunde Michael (Robert DeNiro), Nick (Christopher Walken), Stan (John
Cazale), Linda (Meryl Streep), Axel (Chuck Aspegren) und weitere Freunde aus
der Umgebung die Hochzeit von Steven (John Savage) und seiner Angela
(Rutanya Alda). Doch ihre Gedanken kreisen um das wichtigste Thema in
Amerika dieser Tage: dem Krieg in Vietnam.
At the time, critical analysis of The Deer Hunter focused almost universally on the film's war themes and metaphors, particularly its controversial Russian roulette scenes. Released a scant few years following the fall of Saigon, the tenor of the times almost demanded the film's examination as a treatise on the devastating human effects of war. The passage of time offers a healing distance from the polarizing events of the era, and now viewed anew across the comfort of a quarter century, The Deer Hunter presents itself less as a three-act opus on the sins of war and more as a quietly devastating look at the strength and pain of friendship.
Three stay at home while three go off to war, the latter to be reunited under the cruelest of circumstances when Michael, Nick, and Stevie (Christopher Walken and John Savage) are taken prisoner. The physical and psychological horror endured by the trio as they are forced to face each other in sadistic rounds of Russian roulette is made all the more shattering by Michael's strength and his barely controlled determination to will his friends out of the nightmare. Yet even after he reaches the safety of home the ties to his comrades are unyielding. Michael can barely bring himself to face Nick's girl Linda (Meryl Streep), whom he has painfully adored from afar, let alone consider usurping his friend's place in her bed. Nick is his conscience and it is only after he has met his obligations to his friends that he can consider reclaiming his own life. From the very beginning director Michael Cimino intended The Deer Hunter to be viewed as a tale of friendship. He once said, "The war is really incidental to the development of the characters and their story. It's part of their lives and just that, nothing more." The distance of 25 years allows the viewer to see more clearly what audiences of the time still sensitive to the bruise of Vietnam backlash might have missed. Of course the indelible performances make it that much easier; no amount of time can change the strength of Cimino's up-and-coming ensemble cast or leave a doubt as to why the film earned Christopher Walkenan Oscar®, did so much to advance the career of Meryl Streep, or cement DeNiro's reputation as one of the finest actors on the planet. Time, the great equalizer, has blown the dust off the The Deer Hunter and exposed its heart."(www.amtc.com)
www.nytimes.com/packages/html/movies/bestpictures/deer-re.html
50 Greatest Movie
Deaths
"If Christopher Walken were not such an experienced actor, he might well qualify as Rookie of the Year. Until he wont the New York Film Critics Awards last week for best supporting actor, he had been a fairly unfamiliar fact to movie audiences, even though he had won numerous awards for his work on the stage. But in ''The Deer Hunter,'' Mr. Walken does his first real movie star turn, bringing virtuoso technique and glamour to a character who is, in effect, the film's romantic hero. His performance is so utterly persuasive that his own parents, after watching the film and its brutal finale, rushed off to a telephone to make sure their son was still in one piece. Perched nervously in an armchair in his agent's apartment recently, Mr. Walken talked about ''The Deer Hunter'' with fondness and a touch of amazement. But he sounded surprisingly modest about his own accomplishments in the film. ''On the stage I know what I'm doing,'' he said, ''but in films I have to depend on the kindness of strangers.'' Kindest of them all was Michael Cimino, the director, who astonished the actor by casting him in the film's second leading role. ''I walked in and he asked me who I'd like to play,'' Mr. Walken recalled. ''I named about four of them, but I figured if I was lucky I might get to play Stan, the one that John Cazale played. I never expected him to cast me as Nick. It was just too good a part.'' Mr. Cimino has since been even kinder, casting Mr. Walken with Kris Kristofferson in the director's next film, ''Johnson County War.'' Ordinarily, Mr. Walken's manner combines an element of urbanity with unexpected street toughness. But this time he is going to ride a horse and shoot people.
Then the director and Robert DeNiro, who stars in the film, came up with the idea of having one of the Thai actors repeatedly slap Mr. Walken's and Mr. DeNiro's faces, trying to force them to play a round of Russian roulette. Mr. Walken had not known exactly how he was going to summon up the necessary note of horror for the scene - ''that was one of many big moments I had in the film, where I walked onto the set thinking, 'I wish I knew what I was doing,''' he recalled. ''But when somebody belts you 50 times, you don't have to fake a reaction. You don't have trouble shaking.'' The P.O.W. scene was only one of many in which Mr. Walken says Mr. DeNiro helped him a great deal. ''He's the most generous actor I've ever worked with,'' he explained. In the scene where I'm in the gaming room for the first time, for instance, and I pick up the gun and hold it to my head, he showed me how to do that. It's a very good moment for me, and I have to admit it's stolen.'' But Mr. Walken put his respect for Mr. DeNiro to good use. ''My admiration for him is one of the things that shows in the film, but it had some bearing on the characters. They're supposed to have been friends for 20 years, there's a powerful feeling between them. I think my feelings about his work help create an impression of warmth, of friendship.'' Some viewers of ''The Deer Hunter'' maintain that the friendship has homosexual overtones, but Mr. Walken says that as far as he knows neither he nor the other principals had any such thing in mind.
''Sometimes people will look at that and say, 'What an economical actor.' But if I was to be frank about it, it was probably because I was nervous about being in movies.'' He hopes that that will change, and that his composure on screen will equal his confidence on the stage. Mr. Walken grew up in Astoria, Queens, where his father was a baker; his mother encouraged him and his two brothers to act. While his brothers concentrated on television work, he went into musicals, first appearing in ''Best Foot Forward'' with another talented neophyte, Liza Minnelli. He landed a lot of chorus work after that, but it was not until he won a leading role in ''The Lion in Winter'' that he was offered serious roles. ''The Lion in Winter'' called for him to wear tights, and he wore them so effectively that a chance to play Romeo came his way. ''I was terrible,'' he notes. All told, he has about 60 plays to his credit, most notably ''Sweet Bird of Youth'' opposite Irene Worth. Mr. Walken, who appears to be in his late 20's, is 35 years old. ''People always tell me to say I'm younger - better to have 'em think you're 30, that you haven't been around so long, that you're not so old and work out.'' In fact, he looks younger and healthier in ''The Deer Hunter'' than he has in his previous films, which also include ''The Anderson Tapes'' and ''Roseland.'' As he explains it: ‘‘Since I did those films, my life has changed to some extent. I don't drink as much as I used to, I take better care of myself. I tried running for a while, too, but I couldn't take it. I figured I'd wind up having a great heart and dying of boredom.'' Mr. Walken, who lives in Manhattan with his wife, does not maintain that stage acting is intrinsically more worthwhile than screen acting. He would like to continue to do both. ''I love to make movies - now that I've started to make 'em, I want to make a lot. I like the whole atmosphere. And also, I admire some of those actors so much, I want to learn how to do it.'' Until now, movie roles have been hard for him to come by, and even now he is asked to audition for film directors. In the theater, his work is sufficiently well known and admired to preclude that. With filmmakers, though, ''what they mostly do is say: 'Come sit. Speak, so we can hear you speak. Move your face.' That's O.K. with me. I don't mind doing it. I still want to get jobs. But I'm looking forward to the day when I don't have to pretend I'm enjoying myself.'' (NYT, 1978)
December 15, 1978, REVIEW | 'THE DEER HUNTER' Blue-Collar Epic, By VINCENT CANBY Michael's Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" is a big, awkward, crazily ambitious, sometimes breathtaking motion picture that comes as close to being a popular epic as any movie about this country since "The Godfather." Though he has written a number of screenplays, Mr. Cimino has only directed one other movie (the 1974 box-office hit, "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot"), which makes his present achievement even more impressive. Maybe he just didn't know enough to stop. Instead, he's tried to create a film that is nothing less than an appraisal of American life in the second half of the 20th century. I don't mean to make "The Deer Hunter" sound like "War and Peace" or even "Gone With the Wind." Its view is limited and its narrative at times sketchy. It's about three young men who have been raised together in a Pennsylvania steel town, work together in its mill, drink, bowl and raise hell together, and then, for no better reason than that the war is there, they go off to fight in Vietnam. "The Deer Hunter," which opens today at the Coronet, is an update on the national dream, long after World War II when America's self-confidence peaked, after the Marshall Plan, after Korea, dealing with people who've grown up in the television age and matured in the decade of assassinations and disbelief. The three friends, all of Russian extraction, are Mike (Robert DeNiro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steve (John Savage). Mike is the one who calls the tune for his friends. To the extent that any one of them has an interior life, it is Mike, a man who makes a big thing about hunting, about bringing down a deer with one shot. More than one shot apparently isn't fair. As codes go this one is not great, but it is his own.
Mr. Cimino has described his treatment of the three friends' war experiences as surreal, which is another way of saying that a lot of recent history is ellipsized or shaped to fit the needs of the film. What is not surreal is the brutality of the war and its brutalizing effects, scenes that haunt "The Deer Hunter" and give point to the film even as it slips into the wildest sort of melodrama, which Mr. Cimino plays out against the background of the collapse of Saigon and the American withdrawal from Southeast Asia. It's Armageddon with helicopters. Most particular and most savage is the film's use of Russian roulette as a metaphor for war's waste. It's introduced when the three friends, prisoners of war of the North Vietnamese, are forced by their captors to play Russian roulette with one another. The game crops up again in Saigon where, according to this film, it was played in back-street arenas rather like cockfighting pits, for high-dollar stakes. These sequences are as explicitly bloody as anything you're likely to see in a commercial film. They are so rough, in fact, that they raise the question of whether such vivid portrayals don't become dehumanizing themselves. More terrifying than the violence--certainly more provocative and moving--is the way each of the soldiers reacts to his war experiences. Not once does anyone question the war or his participation in it. This passivity may be the real horror at the center of American life, and more significant than any number of hope-filled tales about raised political consciousnesses. What are these veterans left with? Feelings of contained befuddlement, a desire to make do and, perhaps, a more profound appreciation for love, friendship and community. The big answers elude them, as do the big questions. Deric Washburn's screenplay, which takes its time in the way of a big novel, provides fine roles for Mr. DeNiro, Mr. Walken and Mr. Savage, each of whom does some of his best work to date. Meryl Streep, who has long been recognized for her fine performances on the New York stage, gives a smashing film performance as the young woman, who, by tacit agreement among the friends, becomes Nick's girl but who stays around long enough to assert herself. In the splendid supporting cast are George Dzundza, Chuck Aspegren, Shirley Stoler and Rutanya Alda. The late John Cazale makes his last film appearance a memorable one as the kind of barroom neurotic who might at any moment go seriously off his rocker. The film has been stunningly photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, who provides visually a continuity that is sometimes lacking in the rest of the movie. "The Deer Hunter" is both deeply troubling and troublesome (for the manner in which Mr. Cimino manipulates the narrative), but its feelings for time, place and blue-collar people are genuine, and its vision is that of an original, major new film maker. With Robert DeNiro, John Cazale, John Savage, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep, George Dzundza and Chuck Aspegren.
Directed
by Michael Cimino; screenplay by Deric Washburn; story by Michael Cimino,
Deric Washburn, Louis Garfinkle, and Quinn K. Redeker; director of
photography, Vilmos Zsigmond; production consultant, Joann Carelli; art
directors, Ron Hobs and Kim Swados; editor, Peter Zinner; music by Stanley
Myers; produced by Barry Spikings, Michael Deeley, Michael Cimino, and John
Peverall; released by Universal Studios (NYT, 1978)
MULTIMEDIA:
The Vietcong
Force Roulette, and Michael Calms Steven (Real
Media) click to enlarge
"We got in the helicopter (Chris and
J. Savage), the camera was handheld, and John Savage was behind me and
the door was wide open and there was no safety belts of anything. The
helicopter took off and went right up, I think a thousand feet up as
high as the Empire State Building. I was looking out this door and I
said, "John, grab my belt, hang on to me, do not let go whatever
happens"- I couldn`t believe I was sitting there, next to this open door
without even a rope around me or anything. And the camera was rolling..I
thought if the helicopter tilted sideaways, I`d be gone.." (CW)
"Die durch
die Hölle gehen"
Die Kontroverse um Ciminos Werk gipfelte während
der Filmfestspiele in Berlin 1979 in einem handfesten Skandal.
Die durch die Hölle gehen lief als
offizieller Beitrag der USA im Wettbewerb. Nach der Vorführung packten
die Delegationen aus der UdSSR und den übrigen sozialistischen Ländern
demonstrativ ihre Koffer und reisten ab. Stein des Anstoßes war die etwa
10-minütige Sequenz, in der die sadistischen Grausamkeiten des Vietcong
gegenüber den Südvietnamesen und amerikanischen Soldaten gezeigt werden.
Dies sei eine einseitige Darstellung der Kriegsgreuel, lautete der
Vorwurf.
Eric Remarque's
Three Comrades (Drei Kameraden)
was the inspiration for
The Deer Hunter.
Special Editions 1
1:www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=5482 3: www.dvd-palace.de/dvd-review-r5t1575.htm
www.dvdtown.com/menuscreens/deerhunterthespecialedition
Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" is a three-hour movie in three major
movements. It is a progression from a wedding to a funeral. It is the
story of a group of friends. It is the record of how the war in Vietnam
entered several lives and altered them terribly forever. It is not an
anti-war film. It is not a pro-war film. It is one of the most
emotionally shattering films ever made. It begins with men at work, in
the furnace of the steel mills in a town somewhere in Pennsylvania. The
klaxon sounds, the shift is over, the men go down the road to a saloon
for a beer. They sing "I Love You Bay-bee" along with the jukebox. It is
still morning on the last day of their lives that will belong to them
before Vietnam.
1978 - Academy
Award: Best Supporting Actor, The Deer
Hunter Video of the ceremony (wmv-file, 1 MB)
If Christopher Walken were not such an experienced actor, he might well qualify as Rookie of the Year. Until he wont the New York Film Critics Awards last week for best supporting actor, he had been a fairly unfamiliar fact to movie audiences, even though he had won numerous awards for his work on the stage. But in ''The Deer Hunter,'' Mr. Walken does his first real movie star turn, bringing virtuoso technique and glamour to a character who is, in effect, the film's romantic hero. His performance is so utterly persuasive that his own parents, after watching the film and its brutal finale, rushed off to a telephone to make sure their son was still in one piece.
''On the stage I know what I'm doing,'' he said, ''but in films I have to depend on the kindness of strangers.'' Kindest of them all was Michael Cimino, the director, who astonished the actor by casting him in the film's second leading role. ''I walked in and he asked me who I'd like to play,'' Mr. Walken recalled. ''I named about four of them, but I figured if I was lucky I might get to play Stan, the one that John Cazale played. I never expected him to cast me as Nick. It was just too good a part.'' Mr. Cimino has since been even kinder, casting Mr. Walken with Kris Kristofferson in the director's next film, ''Johnson County War.'' Ordinarily, Mr. Walken's manner combines an element of urbanity with unexpected street toughness. But this time he is going to ride a horse and shoot people. However much physical exertion Mr. Cimino's next film demands of its actors, it is not likely to be as strenuous as his Vietnam war epic, ''The Deer Hunter.'' That five-month shooting schedule culminated in a grueling stay in Thailand, where a terrifying torture sequence was staged. Mr. Walken and other actors, playing American prisoners of war, were confined in special cages that had been built on the River Kwai, not far from the famous bridge. As Mr. Walken recalls: 'The circumstances were genuine: We were up to here in water, it was hot, and we'd been doing it a long time. We'd been tied up. There were mosquitoes. There were rats.'' Then the director and Robert DeNiro, who stars in the film, came up with the idea of having one of the Thai actors repeatedly slap Mr. Walken's and Mr. DeNiro's faces, trying to force them to play a round of Russian roulette. Mr. Walken had not known exactly how he was going to summon up the necessary note of horror for the scene - ''that was one of many big moments I had in the film, where I walked onto the set thinking, 'I wish I knew what I was doing,''' he recalled. ''But when somebody belts you 50 times, you don't have to fake a reaction. You don't have trouble shaking.''
But Mr. Walken put his respect for Mr. DeNiro to good use. ''My admiration for him is one of the things that shows in the film, but it had some bearing on the characters. They're supposed to have been friends for 20 years, there's a powerful feeling between them. I think my feelings about his work help create an impression of warmth, of friendship.'' Some viewers of ''The Deer Hunter'' maintain that the friendship has homosexual overtones, but Mr. Walken says that as far as he knows neither he nor the other principals had any such thing in mind. Mr. Walken's performance, at first genial and then terrifyingly blank, is very much at odds with the coolly impassive characters he has played in other films. In ''Annie Hall,'' he was memorably stony as Annie's very strange brother, and in ''Next Stop, Greenwich Village'' his unresponsiveness to the other characters amounted to a kind of cruelty. ''Sometimes people will look at that and say, 'What an economical actor.' But if I was to be frank about it, it was probably because I was nervous about being in movies.'' He hopes that that will change, and that his composure on screen will equal his confidence on the stage. Mr. Walken grew up in Astoria, Queens, where his father was a baker; his mother encouraged him and his two brothers to act. While his brothers concentrated on television work, he went into musicals, first appearing in ''Best Foot Forward'' with another talented neophyte, Liza Minnelli. He landed a lot of chorus work after that, but it was not until he won a leading role in ''The Lion in Winter'' that he was offered serious roles. ''The Lion in Winter'' called for him to wear tights, and he wore them so effectively that a chance to play Romeo came his way. ''I was terrible,'' he notes. All told, he has about 60 plays to his credit, most notably ''Sweet Bird of Youth'' opposite Irene Worth. Mr. Walken, who appears to be in his late 20's, is 35 years old. ''People always tell me to say I'm younger - better to have 'em think you're 30, that you haven't been around so long, that you're not so old and work out.'' In fact, he looks younger and healthier in ''The Deer Hunter'' than he has in his previous films, which also include ''The Anderson Tapes'' and ''Roseland.'' As he explains it: ‘‘Since I did those films, my life has changed to some extent. I don't drink as much as I used to, I take better care of myself. I tried running for a while, too, but I couldn't take it. I figured I'd wind up having a great heart and dying of boredom.'' Mr. Walken, who lives in Manhattan with his wife, does not maintain that stage acting is intrinsically more worthwhile than screen acting. He would like to continue to do both. ''I love to make movies - now that I've started to make 'em, I want to make a lot. I like the whole atmosphere. And also, I admire some of those actors so much, I want to learn how to do it.'' Until now, movie roles have been hard for him to come by, and even now he is asked to audition for film directors. In the theater, his work is sufficiently well known and admired to preclude that.
With
filmmakers, though, ''what they mostly do is say: 'Come sit. Speak, so we
can hear you speak. Move your face.' That's O.K. with me. I don't mind doing
it. I still want to get jobs. But I'm looking forward to the day when I
don't have to pretend I'm enjoying myself.''
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/movies/bestpictures/deer-ar.html
German Christopher Walken-Forum
|
Mike
weiss nur eine Lösung, wie sie ihre Aufseher möglicherweise überrumpeln
können: Er lässt statt einer gleich drei (!) Patronen in die sechs Kammern
des Revolvers füllen, als er gegen seinen eigenen Freund Nick antreten muss.
Und tatsächlich: Die ersten beiden Kammern - eine für ihn und eine für Nick
- waren leer. Und mit den folgenden Patronen erlegt er zwei der Vietkongs
mit einem gezielten Kopfschuss. Nachdem auch die anderen Aufseher
überrumpelt werden können, gelingt Mike, Nick und Steven - der dieses
schreckliche Erlebnis nicht verkraften kann - die Flucht.
Time has not rendered the scenes of war and incarceration any less
harrowing, but has thrown a subtle yet impactful light on the gritty
underlying friendship between the six steel town Pennsylvanians, a bond
forged in boyhood and strengthened through years of camaraderie. It is
through Michael, the unequivocal leader of the group, (played by Robert DeNiro) that the film plumbs the depths of friendship and the
sacrifices people will make. Through day-to-day pettiness and watershed
events, we see Michael's devotion to two things - his comrades and his
approach to deer hunting - and his struggle to be as faithful and true to
the former as he is to his one shot hunting coda.
However much physical exertion Mr. Cimino's next film demands of its
actors, it is not likely to be as strenuous as his Vietnam war epic,
''The Deer Hunter.'' That five-month shooting schedule culminated in a
grueling stay in Thailand, where a terrifying torture sequence was
staged. Mr. Walken and other actors, playing American prisoners of war,
were confined in special cages that had been built on the River Kwai,
not far from the famous bridge. As Mr. Walken recalls: 'The
circumstances were genuine: We were up to here in water, it was hot, and
we'd been doing it a long time. We'd been tied up. There were
mosquitoes. There were rats.'' 
Mr. Walken's performance, at first genial and then terrifyingly
blank, is very much at odds with the coolly impassive characters he has
played in other films. In ''Annie Hall,'' he was memorably stony as
Annie's very strange brother, and in ''Next Stop, Greenwich Village''
his unresponsiveness to the other characters amounted to a kind of
cruelty. 
Nick goes along with Mike, sometimes suspecting that Mike is eccentric,
but respecting his eccentricities. Steve is the conventional one, whose
marriage (a Russian Orthodox ceremony, followed by a huge, hysterical
reception) occupies most of the film's first hour and sets out in rich
detail what I take to be one of the movie's principal concerns--what happens
to Americans when their rituals have become only quaint reminders of the
past rather than life-ordering rules of the present. 
2
3
Perched
nervously in an armchair in his agent's apartment recently, Mr. Walken
talked about ''The Deer Hunter'' with fondness and a touch of amazement. But
he sounded surprisingly modest about his own accomplishments in the film.
The P.O.W.
scene was only one of many in which Mr. Walken says Mr. DeNiro helped him a
great deal. ''He's the most generous actor I've ever worked with,'' he
explained. In the scene where I'm in the gaming room for the first time, for
instance, and I pick up the gun and hold it to my head, he showed me how to
do that. It's a very good moment for me, and I have to admit it's stolen.''
