The Deer Hunter has stood the test of time and I am sure it will still be eminently watchable in another 30 years.

Rating: 10/10 (6 May 2016)

The other day I dipped into the past and had a second viewing of Michael Cimino's Deer Hunter. It is a 3-hour epic about three blue- collar Pennsylvania workers who enlist to fight in Vietnam and about their friends, wives, and lovers that they leave back home. The film, which was made in 1979, was the only really successful movie in Cimino's brief directorial career and some maintain that the sheer effort of getting this masterpiece to the screen was so draining on his creative juices that he was subsequently washed out as a director for ever more.
I have no idea if there is any substance to this, but, watching this film, after a break of some 30 odd years, I still find it an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, and it must surely be in anyone's top ten of all-time greatest movies. Apart from arguably, the overlong wedding scene, (about 51 minutes!), the film just flies by. The film is not really about the Vietnam War. It is about a group of men whose lives are changed forever by the horrors of war – it could have been any war – and more of the action actually takes place in America than in the 'war zones'.
As with any great movie, the cast is superb, without a single weak link. Leading the pack are Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken and John Savage – a virtual who's who of Hollywood's greatest and they certainly pulled out all the stops here. Deer Hunter is a very moving, very scary, electrifying, extremely thought-provoking film. It explores the conflicting reactions of regular, working-class Americans, when they are transplanted into a totally alien, hostile, tropical climate - to a country where life means nothing and where the American psyche suffered a bloody nose. The Vietnam sequences were actually shot in Thailand and I happened to have been there at the time and knew many locals who were involved in the production. I also recognised many of the 'bit-players' and the nightclub sequences that were shot in the Patpong red-light district of Bangkok.
So it was really turning back of the clock when I watched this movie the other day. On the first occasion, I watched it in a cinema in Bangkok, which was packed to overflowing due to the publicity it had received as it was partly shot in Thailand. The film actually flopped at the box office in Thailand as the Thais just didn't get it and I am sure many walked out before the conclusion of the notorious 51-minute wedding scene.
But there is no doubt in this reviewer's mind that The Deer Hunter has stood the test of time and I am sure it will still be eminently watchable in another 30 years. Movie lovers out there who have not seen The Deer Hunter would do well to seek it out and see how an old-fashioned piece of American filmmaking can still move you and inspire you.
Happy movie watching, folks