The Deer Hunter Review

Michael Cimino's wedding sequence runs about fifty minutes, and it is the film's foundation. Shot at a Russian Orthodox cathedral and hall in Cleveland, with extras drinking real liquor, it lets Vilmos Zsigmond's camera roam a community until you know who dances with whom and who drinks too much. The deer hunt that follows, filmed in Washington's Cascades rather than Pennsylvania, gives Robert De Niro's Mike his creed of one shot and a silence the film keeps returning to.

Then Cimino cuts straight to Vietnam, and the prison sequence, in which captors force Mike, Christopher Walken's Nick and John Savage's Steven to play Russian roulette, is among the most harrowing in American film. It is also invented: there are no documented cases of it in the war, Peter Arnett called the metaphor a bloody lie, and Pauline Kael objected to Vietnamese characters drawn as inscrutable sadists. Roger Ebert defended the game as the film's organizing symbol, which is the only way to take it.

Walken won the Oscar, Meryl Streep turns a thinly written girlfriend into a person in her first nominated role, and John Cazale, gravely ill during the shoot, gives his last performance. It won five Oscars, including best picture, but its length and one-sided view of the war blunt it, as even admirers concede.