The Deer Hunter

The Deer Hunter is a 1978 American epic war drama film co-written and directed by Michael Cimino about a trio of Slavic-American steelworkers whose lives are upended by fighting in the Vietnam War. The soldiers are played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage, with John Cazale (in his final role), Meryl Streep and George Dzundza in supporting roles. The story takes place in Clairton, Pennsylvania, a working-class town on the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh, and in Vietnam.
The film is based in part on an unproduced screenplay called The Man Who Came to Play by Louis A. Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker about Las Vegas and Russian roulette. Producer Michael Deeley, who bought the script, hired Cimino, who, with Deric Washburn, rewrote the script, taking the Russian roulette element and placing it in the Vietnam War. The film went over budget and over schedule, costing $15 million. Its production company EMI Films released it internationally, while Universal Pictures handled its domestic distribution.
The Deer Hunter received acclaim from critics and audiences, with praise for Cimino's direction, the performances of its cast, its screenplay, realistic themes and tones, and cinematography. It was also successful at the box office, grossing $49 million. At the 51st Academy Awards, it was nominated for nine Academy Awards, and won five: Best Picture, Best Director (for Cimino), Best Supporting Actor (for Walken), Best Sound and Best Film Editing. It is Meryl Streep's first Academy Award nomination (for Best Supporting Actress).
The Deer Hunter has been included on lists of the best films ever made, including being named the 53rd-greatest American film of all time by the American Film Institute in 2007 in their 10th Anniversary Edition of the AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list. It was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1996, as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
In 1968, three friends in a tight-knit Slavic-American community in Western Pennsylvania—Mike Vronsky, Steven Pushkov and Nikanor "Nick" Chevotarevich—work in a steel mill and hunt deer with their co-workers Stanley ("Stan") and Peter "Axel" Axelrod, along with friend and bartender John Welsh. Mike, Steven and Nick are preparing to leave for military service in Vietnam. Steven is engaged to Angela Ludhjduravic, who was secretly impregnated by another man. Mike and Nick are close friends who live together and both love Linda, who will be moving into their home to escape from her alcoholic father. After catching the bouquet at Steven and Angela's wedding, Linda accepts Nick's spontaneous marriage proposal. Nick implores Mike to ensure that he returns from Vietnam. Mike, Nick and their friends go on a final hunting trip, and Mike kills a deer with a single shot.
In 1969, in Vietnam, Mike, now a Green Beret, accidentally crosses paths with Nick and Steven, who land in a village during an Air Assault mission. The three are soon imprisoned by the Viet Cong in a cage along a river and forced to participate in games of Russian roulette while the jailers wager. Steven fires his round at the ceiling and is forced into a cage with rats and previous victims of the jailers. Mike convinces his captors to put three bullets into the revolver's cylinder. Mike kills two captors, and he and Nick overpower the others; although Nick is wounded in the leg. They escape, rescuing Steven in the process.
The trio floats down the river on a felled tree trunk, but Nick and Steven are weak from their wounds. They are found by an American helicopter. Nick boards and is rescued, but Steven falls back into the river while trying to hold onto the helicopter skids, and Mike drops down to help him. Steven breaks both of his legs on the river’s rock bottom, so Mike carries him until they join refugees and a South Vietnamese Army convoy fleeing to Saigon.
Nick is treated at a U.S. military hospital. When released, Nick, now suffering from PTSD, wanders into a gambling den. French businessman Julien Grinda persuades him to come inside. Upset, Nick interrupts a game of Russian roulette, pulling the trigger on himself. Mike happens to be present as a spectator, but Nick and Julien hurriedly leave.
Mike returns home but cannot integrate into civilian life. He avoids a welcome-home party, opting to stay alone in a hotel. He visits Linda and learns that Nick has deserted. Mike visits Angela, who is now a mother but has slipped into catatonia following the return of Steven, who has had both of his legs and one arm amputated. Stan, Axel and John understand nothing of war nor what Mike has experienced. Linda and Mike find comfort in each other's company. During a hunting trip, Mike stops himself from shooting a deer and returns to the cabin, where he finds Stan cavalierly threatening Axel with his pistol. Mike takes it, chambers a single round, and triggers an empty chamber at Stan's head.
Mike visits Steven at a veterans hospital. Steven refuses to come home, saying that he no longer fits in. He shows Mike that he has been regularly receiving large sums of cash from Vietnam. Mike intuits that Nick is the source of these payments, and insists on bringing Steven home to Angela.
Mike returns to Vietnam in search of Nick. Wandering around Saigon, which is now in a state of chaos shortly before its fall, Mike finds Julien and persuades him to take him to the gambling den, where he faces Nick, who has become a professional in the macabre game and fails to recognize Mike, in part due to Nick's drug addiction. Mike attempts to bring Nick back to reason by invoking memories of their hunting trips, but Nick maintains his unspirited apathy, even spitting in Mike's face. Finally, during the Russian roulette match between Mike and Nick, Nick recalls Mike's "one shot" mantra and smiles before pulling the trigger and killing himself.
Mike and his friends attend Nick's funeral, and the atmosphere at their local bar is dim and silent. Moved by emotion, John begins to sing "God Bless America" in honor of Nick, and all join in.
Although Deeley was pleased with the revised script, he was still concerned with being able to sell the film. He later wrote, "We still had to get millions out of a major studio, as well as convince our markets around the world that they should buy it before it was finished. I needed someone with the caliber of Robert De Niro." Deeley felt that De Niro was "the right age, apparently tough as hell, and immensely talented".
De Niro, who knew many actors in New York, brought Streep and Cazale to the attention of Cimino and Deeley. De Niro also accompanied Cimino to scout locations for the steel-mill sequence, and rehearsed with the actors to use the workshops as a bonding process.
Each of the six principal male characters carried a photo in his back pocket depicting them all together as children to enhance the sense of camaraderie among them. Cimino instructed the props department to fashion complete photo IDs for each of them, including driver licenses and medical cards, to enhance each actor's sense of his character.
There has been considerable debate and controversy about how The Deer Hunter was initially developed and written. Director and cowriter Michael Cimino, writer Deric Washburn and producers Barry Spikings and Michael Deeley all have different versions of how the film came to be.
In 1968, record company EMI formed a new company, EMI Films, headed by producers Barry Spikings and Deeley. Deeley purchased the first draft of a spec script called The Man Who Came to Play, written by Louis A. Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker, for $19,000. It was about people who go to Las Vegas to play Russian roulette. Deeley later wrote, "The screenplay had struck me as brilliant, but it wasn't complete. The trick would be to find a way to turn a very clever piece of writing into a practical, realizable film." When the film was being planned during the mid-1970s, the Vietnam War was still a taboo subject with all major Hollywood studios. According to Deeley, the standard response was that "no American would want to see a picture about Vietnam".
After consulting with various Hollywood agents, Deeley found Cimino and was impressed by Cimino's television commercial work and his crime film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974). Cimino was confident that he could further develop the principal characters of The Man Who Came to Play without losing the essence of the original. According to Deeley, Cimino questioned the need for the Russian-roulette element of the script, but Redeker fervently fought to preserve it. Cimino and Deeley discussed the work that would be needed in the first part of the script, and Cimino believed that he could develop the stories of the main characters in the film's first twenty minutes.
Cimino worked for six weeks with Deric Washburn on the script. Cimino and Washburn had previously collaborated with Steven Bochco on the screenplay for Silent Running (1972). According to producer Barry Spikings, Cimino said that he wanted to work with Washburn again. According to Deeley, he heard from an office rumor that Washburn was contracted by Cimino to work on the script. "Whether Cimino hired Washburn as his sub-contractor or as a co-writer was constantly being obfuscated," wrote Deeley, "and there were some harsh words between them later on, or so I was told."
Cimino's claim
According to Cimino, he would call Washburn while on the road scouting for locations and feed him notes on dialogue and story. After reviewing Washburn's draft, Cimino said, "I came back and read it and I just could not believe what I read. It was like it was written by somebody who was... mentally deranged." Cimino confronted Washburn at the Sunset Marquis in LA about the draft, and Washburn supposedly replied that he could not take the pressure and had to go home. So Cimino fired Washburn. Cimino later claimed to have written the entire screenplay. Washburn's response to Cimino's claim was, "It's all nonsense. It's lies. I didn't have a single drink the entire time I was working on the script."
Washburn's claim
According to Washburn, he and Cimino spent three days together in Los Angeles at the Sunset Marquis hammering out the plot. The script eventually went through several drafts, evolving into a story with three distinct acts. Washburn did not interview any veterans to write The Deer Hunter, nor did he do any research. "I had a month, that was it," he explained. "The clock was ticking. Write the fucking script! But all I had to do was watch TV. Those combat cameramen in Vietnam were out there in the field with the guys. I mean, they had stuff that you wouldn't dream of seeing about Iraq."
When Washburn was finished, he says, Cimino and Joann Carelli, the latter an associate producer on The Deer Hunter who went on to produce two more of Cimino's films, took him to dinner at a cheap restaurant near the Sunset Strip. He recalled, "We finished, and Joann looks at me across the table, and she says, 'Well, Deric, it's fuck-off time.' I was fired. It was a classic case: you get a dummy, get him to write the goddamn thing, tell him to go fuck himself, put your name on the thing, and he'll go away. I was so tired, I didn't care. I'd been working 20 hours a day for a month. I got on the plane the next day, and I went back to Manhattan and my carpenter job."
Deeley's reaction to the revised script
Deeley felt that the revised script, now called The Deer Hunter, broke fresh ground for the project. The protagonist in the Redeker/Garfinkle script, Merle, was an individual who sustained a bad injury in active service and was damaged psychologically by his violent experiences, but was nevertheless a tough character with strong nerves and guts. Cimino and Washburn's revised script distilled the three aspects of Merle's personality and separated them into three distinct characters. They became three old friends who grew up in the same small industrial town and worked in the same steel mill, and in due course, were drafted to serve in Vietnam. In the original script, the roles of Merle (later renamed Mike) and Nick were reversed in the last half of the film. Nick returns home to Linda, while Mike remains in Vietnam, sends money home to help Steven, and meets his tragic fate at the Russian-roulette table.
A Writers' Guild arbitration process awarded Washburn sole "Screenplay by" credit. Garfinkle and Redeker were given a shared "Story by" credit with Cimino and Washburn. Deeley felt that the story credits for Garfinkle and Redeker "did them less than justice". Cimino contested the results of the arbitration. "In their Nazi wisdom," added Cimino, "[they] didn't give me the credit because I would be producer, director and writer." All four writers—Cimino, Washburn, Garfinkle and Redeker—received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for the film.
The Deer Hunter began principal photography on June 20, 1977. It was the first feature film depicting the Vietnam War to be filmed in Thailand. All scenes were shot on location (no sound stages). "There was discussion about shooting the film on a backlot, but the material demanded more realism," says Spikings. The cast and crew watched large amounts of news footage from the war to ensure authenticity. The film was shot in six months. The scenes of Clairton, Pennsylvania, comprise footage that was shot in eight towns in three states: West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. The film's initial budget was $8.5 million.
Meryl Streep accepted the role of the "vague, stock girlfriend" to remain for the duration of filming with John Cazale, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer. De Niro had spotted Streep in the stage production of The Cherry Orchard and suggested that she play his girlfriend Linda. Meryl Streep wrote all of her lines. Streep is said to have accepted the role to primarily be with Cazale.
Before the beginning of principal photography, Deeley met with the film's appointed line producer Robert Relyea, whom Deeley hired after meeting him on the set of Bullitt (1968) and being impressed with his experience. However, Relyea declined the job, refusing to disclose his reason. Deeley suspected that Relyea sensed in director Cimino something that would have made production difficult. As a result, Cimino was acting without the day-to-day supervision of a producer.
Because Deeley was busy overseeing the production of Sam Peckinpah's Convoy (1978), he hired John Peverall to oversee Cimino's shoot. Peverall's expertise with budgeting and scheduling made him a natural successor to Relyea, and Peverall knew enough about the picture to be elevated to the status of producer. "John is a straightforward Cornishman who had worked his way up to become a production supervisor," wrote Deeley, "and we employed him as EMI's watchman on certain pictures."
The wedding scenes were filmed at historic St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. They took five days to film. St. Theodosius's Father Stephen Kopestonsky was cast as the priest. The reception scene was filmed at nearby Lemko Association Hall. The amateur extras cast for the crowded wedding-dance sequences drank real liquor and beer. The scenes were filmed in the summer, in 95 °F (35 °C) weather, but were set in the fall. To accomplish a fall look, individual leaves were removed from deciduous trees. Vilmos Zsigmond also had to desaturate the colors of the exterior shots, partly in camera and partly in laboratory processing.
The production manager asked each of the extras who were portraying Russian immigrants to bring to the location a gift-wrapped box to double for wedding presents. The manager figured that if the extras did this, not only would the production save time and money, but the gifts would look more authentic. After the unit unwrapped and the extras disappeared, the crew discovered to their amusement that the boxes were not empty but filled with real presents, from china to silverware. "Who got to keep all these wonderful offerings," wrote Deeley, "is a mystery I never quite fathomed."
Cimino originally claimed that the wedding scene would take up 21 minutes of screen time; in the end, it took 51 minutes. Deeley believes that Cimino always planned to make this prologue last for an hour, and that "the plan was to be advanced by stealth rather than straight dealing".
At this point in the production, nearly halfway through principal photography, Cimino was already over budget, and producer Spikings could tell from the script that shooting the extended scene could sink the project.
The bar was specially constructed in an empty storefront in Mingo Junction, Ohio, for $25,000; it soon became an actual saloon for local steel-mill workers. U.S. Steel allowed filming inside its Cleveland mill, including placing the actors around the furnace floor, after securing a $5 million insurance policy. Other filming took place in Pittsburgh.
The first deer to be shot was depicted in a "gruesome close-up", although it was hit with only a tranquilizer dart. This was not a white-tailed buck, which is native to Pennsylvania, but a red deer native to Eurasia. The stag that Michael lets escape is the same as the one used on TV commercials for The Hartford.
The Viet Cong Russian-roulette scenes were shot with real rats and mosquitoes, as the three principals (De Niro, Walken and Savage) were tied up in bamboo cages erected along the River Kwai. The woman who was given the task of casting extras in Thailand had much difficulty finding a local to play the vicious-looking individual who runs the game. The first hired actor was incapable of slapping De Niro in the face. The casting agent found a local Thai man, Somsak Sengvilai, who held a particular dislike of Americans, and so he was cast. De Niro suggested that Walken be slapped by one of the guards without any warning, and Walken's reaction was genuine. Producer Deeley has said that Cimino shot the brutal Viet Cong Russian-roulette scenes brilliantly and more efficiently than any other part of the film.
De Niro and Savage performed their own stunts in the fall into the river, filming the 30 feet (9.1 m) drop 15 times in two days. During the helicopter stunt, the skids got caught on the rope bridge as the helicopter ascended, threatening to seriously injure De Niro and Savage. The actors gestured and shouted to the crew in the helicopter to warn them. Footage of this is included in the film.
According to Cimino, De Niro requested a live cartridge in the revolver for the scene in which he subjects John Cazale's character to an impromptu game of Russian roulette, to heighten the intensity of the situation. Cazale agreed without protest, but obsessively rechecked the gun before each take to be sure that the live round was not in the next chamber.
Although appearing later in the film, the first scenes shot in Thailand were the hospital sequences between Walken and the military doctor. Deeley believed that this scene was "the spur that would earn him an Academy Award".
In the final scene between Mike and Nick in the gambling den, Cimino had Walken and De Niro improvise in one take. His direction to his actors: "You put the gun to your head, Chris, you shoot, you fall over and Bobby cradles your head."
Thailand
United States
By this point, The Deer Hunter had cost $13 million, and the film still had to go through an arduous post-production. Film editor Peter Zinner was given 600,000 feet (110 mi; 180 km) of printed film to edit, a monumental task at the time. Producers Spikings and Deeley were pleased with the first cut, which ran for three-and-a-half hours. "We were thrilled by what we saw," wrote Deeley, "and knew that within the three and a half hours we watched there was a riveting film."
Executives from Universal, including Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg, were not very enthusiastic. "I think they were shocked," recalled Spikings. "What really upset them was 'God Bless America'. Sheinberg thought it was anti-American. He was vehement. He said something like, 'You're poking a stick in the eye of America.' They really didn't like the movie. And they certainly didn't like it at three hours and two minutes."
Deeley was not surprised by Universal's response. He said, "The Deer Hunter was a United Artists sort of picture, whereas Convoy was more in the style of Universal. I'd muddled and sold the wrong picture to each studio." Deeley did agree with Universal that the film needed to be shorter, not only because of pacing, but also to ensure commercial success. "A picture under two and a half hours can scrape three shows a day," wrote Deeley, "but at three hours you've lost one third of your screenings and one third of your income for the cinemas, distributors, and profit participants."
Universal president Thom Mount said, "This was just a... continuing nightmare from the day Michael finished the picture to the day we released it. That was simply because he was wedded to everything he shot. The movie was endless. It was The Deer Hunter and the Hunter and the Hunter. The wedding sequence was a cinematic event all unto its own." Mount said that he turned to Verna Fields, Universal's head of post-production. "I sicced Verna on Cimino," Mount said. "Verna was no slouch. She started to turn the heat up on Michael, and he started screeching and yelling."
Zinner eventually cut the film to 18,000 feet (3.4 mi; 5.5 km). Cimino soon fired Zinner when he discovered that Zinner was editing the wedding scenes. Ironically, Zinner won the Best Editing Oscar for The Deer Hunter. Regarding his clashes with Cimino, Zinner stated, "Michael Cimino and I had our differences at the end, but he kissed me when we both got Academy Awards." Cimino commented in The New York Observer, "[Zinner] was a moron ... I cut Deer Hunter myself."
The Deer Hunter was Cimino's first film to use the Dolby noise-reduction system. "What Dolby does," replied Cimino, "is to give you the ability to create a density of detail of sound—a richness so you can demolish the wall separating the viewer from the film. You can come close to demolishing the screen." It took five months to mix the soundtrack. One short battle sequence—200 feet of film in the final cut—took five days to dub. Another sequence recreated the 1975 American evacuation of Saigon; Cimino brought the film's composer Stanley Myers to the location to listen to the auto, tank and jeep horns while the sequence was being photographed. The result, according to Cimino: Myers composed the music for that scene in the same key as the horn sounds, so that the music and the sound effects would blend with the images to create one jarring, desolate experience.
Both the long and short versions of the movie were previewed to Midwestern audiences, although there are differing accounts among Cimino, Deeley and Spikings regarding how the previews panned out. Director Cimino claimed that he bribed the projectionist to interrupt the shorter version to obtain better reviews of the longer one. According to producer Spikings, Wasserman let EMI's CEO Bernard Delfont decide between the two, and he chose Cimino's longer cut. Deeley claimed that the tested two-and-a-half-hour version had a better response.
The soundtrack to The Deer Hunter was released on CD on October 25, 1990.
The producer Allan Carr took control of the movie's marketing and convinced the studio to allow the film to be played on the Z Channel before theatrical release.
The Deer Hunter debuted at one theater in New York and one in Los Angeles for a week on December 8, 1978. The release strategy was to qualify the film for Oscar consideration and close after a week to build interest.
After the Oscar nominations, Universal widened the distribution to include major cities, building up to a full-scale release on February 23, 1979, after the previous year's Oscars. The Deer Hunter pioneered a new release pattern for so-called prestige pictures that screen only at the end of the year to qualify for Academy Award recognition. The film eventually grossed $48.9 million at the US box office.
CBS paid $3.5 million for three runs of the film. The network later canceled the acquisition on the contractually permitted grounds of the film containing too much violence for US network transmission; the Russian-roulette scene was deemed controversial.
The Deer Hunter has been released on DVD twice in the US. The first 1998 issue was by Universal, with no extra features and a non-anamorphic transfer, and has been discontinued. A second version, part of the "Legacy Series", was released as a two-disc set on September 6, 2005, with an anamorphic transfer of the film. The set features a cinematographer's commentary by Vilmos Zsigmond, as well as deleted and extended scenes and production notes.
The Region 2 release of The Deer Hunter, released in the UK and Japan, features a commentary track from director Michael Cimino.
The film was released on HD DVD on December 26, 2006.
StudioCanal released the film on the Blu-ray format in countries other than the United States on March 11, 2009. It was released on Blu-ray in the U.S. on March 6, 2012.
On May 26, 2020, Shout! Factory released the film on Ultra HD Blu-ray featuring a new Dolby Vision transfer.
One of the most talked-about sequences in the film, the Viet Cong's use of Russian roulette with POWs was criticized as being contrived and unrealistic because there were no documented cases of Russian roulette in the Vietnam War. Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the war, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "In its 20 years of war, there was not a single recorded case of Russian roulette ... The central metaphor of the movie is simply a bloody lie."
Cimino countered that his film was not political, polemical, literally accurate, nor posturing for any particular point of view. Nevertheless, he also claimed that he had news clippings from Singapore that confirmed that Russian roulette was used during the war, without specifying which article.
In his review, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times defended the artistic license of Russian roulette, arguing, "It is the organizing symbol of the film. Anything you can believe about the game, about its deliberately random violence, about how it touches the sanity of men forced to play it, will apply to the war as a whole. It is a brilliant symbol because, in the context of this story, it makes any ideological statement about the war superfluous."
Film critic and biographer David Thomson also agreed that the film works despite the controversy. "There were complaints that the North Vietnamese had not employed Russian roulette. It was said that the scenes in Saigon were fanciful or imagined. It was also suggested that De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage were too old to have enlisted for Vietnam (Savage, the youngest of the three, was thirty). Three decades later [written in 2008], 'imagination' seems to have stilled those worries ... and The Deer Hunter is one of the great American films."
In her review, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote, "The Vietcong [sic] are treated in the standard inscrutable-evil Oriental style of the Japanese in the Second World War movies ... The impression a viewer gets is that if we did some bad things there we did them ruthlessly but impersonally; the Vietcong were cruel and sadistic."
In his Vanity Fair article "The Vietnam Oscars", Peter Biskind wrote that the political agenda of The Deer Hunter was something of a mystery. "It may have been more a by-product of Hollywood myopia, the demands of the war-film genre, garden-variety American parochialism, and simple ignorance than it was the pre-meditated right-wing road map it seemed to many."
According to Christopher Walken, the historical context was not paramount. "In the making of it, I don't remember anyone ever mentioning Vietnam!" De Niro added to this sentiment. "Whether [the film's vision of the war] actually happened or not, it's something you could imagine very easily happening. Maybe it did. I don't know. All's fair in love and war." Producer Spikings, while proud of the film, regrets the way the Vietnamese are portrayed. "I don't think any of us meant it to be exploitive," Spikings said. "But I think we were ... ignorant. I can't think of a better word for it. I didn't realize how badly we'd behaved to the Vietnamese people ..."
Producer Deeley, on the other hand, was quick to defend Cimino's comments on the nature and motives of the film. "The Deer Hunter wasn't really 'about' Vietnam. It was something very different. It wasn't about drugs or the collapse of the morale of the soldiers. It was about how individuals respond to pressure: different men reacting quite differently. The film was about three steel workers in extraordinary circumstances. Apocalypse Now is surreal. The Deer Hunter is a parable ... Men who fight and lose an unworthy war, face some obvious and unpalatable choices. They can blame their leaders... or they can blame themselves. Self-blame has been a great burden for many war veterans. So how does a soldier come to terms with his defeat and yet still retain his self-respect? One way is to present the conquering enemy as so inhuman, and the battle between the good guys (us) and the bad guys (them) so uneven, as to render defeat irrelevant. Inhumanity was the theme of The Deer Hunter's portrayal of the North Vietnamese prison guards forcing American POWs to play Russian roulette. The audience's sympathy with prisoners who (quite understandably) cracked thus completes the chain. Accordingly, some veterans who suffered in that war found the Russian roulette a valid allegory."
Cimino frequently referred to The Deer Hunter as a "personal" and "autobiographical" film, although subsequent investigation by journalists like Tom Buckley of Harper's Magazine revealed inaccuracies in Cimino's accounts and reported background.
AFI's Movie Club says, "The film portrays male friendship in an atypical way for the time," and asks, "How does the friendship of the characters played by Robert De Niro, John Savage, Christopher Walken and John Cazale evolve throughout the film?"
The final scene in which all the main characters gather and sing "God Bless America" became a subject of heated debate among critics when the film was released. It raised the question of whether this conclusion was meant ironically or not—"as a critique of patriotism or a paean to it". Cimino later spoke of his intentions for the scene:
On its release, The Deer Hunter received acclaim from critics, who considered it the best American epic since Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. The film was praised for its depiction of realistic working-class settings and environment; Cimino's direction; the performances of De Niro, Walken, Streep, Savage, Dzundza and Cazale; the symphonic shifts of tone and pacing in moving from America to Vietnam; the tension during the Russian-roulette scenes; and the themes of American disillusionment.
The film holds an approval rating of 86% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 130 reviews, with an average score of 8.60/10. The consensus reads: "Its greatness is blunted by its length and one-sided point of view, but the film's weaknesses are overpowered by Michael Cimino's sympathetic direction and a series of heartbreaking performances from Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, and Christopher Walken". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 90 out of 100 based on reviews from 18 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Roger Ebert gave the film four stars out of four, and called it "one of the most emotionally shattering films ever made". Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune praised the film, saying, "This is a big film, dealing with big issues, made on a grand scale. Much of it, including some casting decisions, suggest inspiration by The Godfather."
Leonard Maltin also gave the film four stars, calling it a "sensitive, painful, evocative work".
Vincent Canby of The New York Times called The Deer Hunter "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."
David Denby of New York magazine called it "an epic", with "qualities that we almost never see any more—range and power and breadth of experience."
Jack Kroll of Time asserted that it put director Cimino "right at the center of film culture".
Stephen Farber pronounced in New West magazine that the movie is "the greatest anti-war movie since La Grande Illusion."
However, The Deer Hunter was not without critical backlash. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote a positive review with some reservations: "[It is] a small minded film with greatness in it ... with an enraptured view of common life ... [but] enraging, because, despite its ambitiousness and scale, it has no more moral intelligence than the Eastwood action pictures."
William Goldman, in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade, described The Deer Hunter as a "well-disguised comic-book movie". He wrote, "I enjoyed it every bit as I used to be enthralled by Batman having it out with the Penguin—and precisely on that level."
Andrew Sarris of The New York Observer wrote that the film was "massively vague, tediously elliptical, and mysteriously hysterical ... It is perhaps significant that the actors remain more interesting than the characters they play."
Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum disparaged The Deer Hunter as an "Oscar-laden weepie about macho buddies" and "a disgusting account of what the evil Vietnamese did to poor, innocent Americans".
John Simon of New York wrote, "For all its pretensions to something newer and better, this film is only an extension of the old Hollywood war-movie lie. The enemy is still bestial and stupid, and no match for our purity and heroism; only we no longer wipe up the floor with him—rather, we litter it with his guts."
In a review for Chicago magazine, Studs Terkel wrote that he was "appalled by its shameless dishonesty", and that "not since The Birth of a Nation has a non-Caucasian people been portrayed in so barbaric a fashion". Cimino's dishonesty "was to project a sadistic psyche not only onto 'Charlie' but to all the Vietnamese portrayed".
Author Karina Longworth notes that Streep "made a case for female empowerment by playing a woman to whom empowerment was a foreign concept—a normal lady from an average American small town, for whom subservience was the only thing she knew". She states that The Deer Hunter "evokes a version of dominant masculinity in which male friendship is a powerful force". It has a "credibly humanist message", and that the "slow study of the men in blissfully ignorant homeland machismo is crucial to it".
Despite its critical acclaim and awards, some critics derided what they considered the film's simplistic, bigoted and historically inaccurate depictions of the Viet Cong and America's position in the Vietnam War. The central theme of the Viet Cong forcing American captives to play Russian roulette has been widely criticized as having no historical basis, a claim that Cimino denied but did not refute with evidence.
During the 29th Berlin International Film Festival in 1979, the Soviet delegation expressed its indignation with the film that, in their opinion, insulted the Vietnamese people in numerous scenes. Other communist states also voiced their solidarity with the "heroic people of Vietnam". They protested the screening of the film and insisted that it violated the statutes of the festival because in no way does it contribute to the "improvement of mutual understanding between the peoples of the world". The ensuing domino effect led to the walk-outs of the Cubans, East Germans, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Poles and Czechoslovakians, and two members of the jury resigned in sympathy.
Academy Award-winning film director Miloš Forman and Academy Award-nominated actor Mickey Rourke consider The Deer Hunter to be one of the greatest films of all time.
Cimino's next film, Heaven's Gate (1980), debuted to lacerating reviews and took in only $3 million in ticket sales, effectively leaving United Artists bankrupt. The failure of Heaven's Gate led several critics to revise their positions on The Deer Hunter. Canby said in his famous review of Heaven's Gate, "[The film] fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect."
Andrew Sarris wrote in his review of Heaven's Gate, "I'm a little surprised that many of the same critics who lionized Cimino for The Deer Hunter have now thrown him to the wolves with equal enthusiasm." Sarris added, "I was never taken in ... Hence, the stupidity and incoherence in Heaven's Gate came as no surprise since very much the same stupidity and incoherence had been amply evident in The Deer Hunter."
In his book Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven's Gate, Steven Bach wrote, "Critics seemed to feel obliged to go on the record about The Deer Hunter, to demonstrate that their critical credentials were un-besmirched by having been, as Andrew Sarris put it, 'taken in'."
Film critic Mark Kermode described Deer Hunter as "a genuinely terrible film".
However, many critics, including David Thomson and A. O. Scott, maintain that The Deer Hunter is a great film, the power of which has not diminished.
Film producer and "old-fashioned mogul" Allan Carr used his networking abilities to promote The Deer Hunter. "Exactly how Allan Carr came into The Deer Hunter's orbit I can no longer remember," recalled producer Deeley, "but the picture became a crusade to him. He nagged, charmed, threw parties, he created word-of-mouth – everything that could be done in Hollywood to promote a project. Because he had no apparent motive for this promotion, it had an added power and legitimacy and it finally did start to penetrate the minds of the Universal's sales people that they actually had in their hands something a bit more significant than the usual." Deeley added that Carr's promotion of the film was influential in positioning The Deer Hunter for Oscar nominations.
On the Sneak Previews special "Oscar Preview for 1978", Roger Ebert correctly predicted that The Deer Hunter would win for Best Picture, while Gene Siskel predicted that Coming Home would win. However, Ebert incorrectly guessed that Robert De Niro would win for Best Actor for Deer Hunter and Jill Clayburgh would win for Best Actress for An Unmarried Woman, while Siskel called the wins for Jon Voight as Best Actor and Jane Fonda as Best Actress, both for Coming Home. Both Ebert and Siskel correctly predicted the win for Christopher Walken receiving the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
According to producer Deeley, orchestrated lobbying against The Deer Hunter was led by Warren Beatty, whose own picture Heaven Can Wait had multiple nominations. Beatty also used ex-girlfriends in his campaign: Julie Christie, serving on the jury at the Berlin Film Festival where Deer Hunter was screened, joined the walkout of the film by the Russian jury members. Jane Fonda also criticized The Deer Hunter in public. Deeley suggested that her criticisms partly stemmed from the competition between her film Coming Home vying with The Deer Hunter for Best Picture. According to Deeley, he planted a friend of his in the Oscar press area behind the stage to ask Fonda if she had seen The Deer Hunter. Fonda replied she had not seen the film, and to this day she still has not.
As the Oscars drew near, the backlash against The Deer Hunter gathered strength. When the limos pulled up to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on April 9, 1979, they were met by demonstrators, mostly from the Los Angeles chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The demonstrators waved placards covered with slogans that read "No Oscars for racism" and "The Deer Hunter a bloody lie", and they thrust pamphlets berating Deer Hunter into long lines of limousine windows. Washburn, nominated for Best Original Screenplay, claimed that his limousine was pelted with stones. According to Variety, "Police and The Deer Hunter protesters clashed in a brief but bloody battle that resulted in 13 arrests."
De Niro was so anxious that he did not attend the Oscars ceremony. He asked the Academy to allow him to sit out the show backstage, but when the Academy refused, De Niro stayed home in New York. Producer Deeley made a deal with fellow producer David Puttnam, whose film Midnight Express was nominated, that each would take $500 to the ceremony so if one of them won, the winner would give the loser the $500 to "drown his sorrows in style".
The Deer Hunter is among the early, and most controversial, major theatrical films to be critical of the American involvement in Vietnam after 1975, when the war officially ended. Although the film opened in the same year as Hal Ashby's Coming Home, Sidney Furie's The Boys in Company C, and Ted Post's Go Tell the Spartans, it is the first film about Vietnam to reach a wide audience and critical acclaim, culminating in winning the Oscar for Best Picture. Other films that illustrate the conditions of the Vietnam War combat include:
David Thomson wrote in an article titled "The Deer Hunter: Story of a scene" that the film changed the way war-time battles were portrayed on film. "The terror and the blast of firepower changed the war film, even if it only used a revolver. More or less before the late 1970s, the movies had lived by a Second World War code in which battle scenes might be fierce but always rigorously controlled. The Deer Hunter unleashed a new, raw dynamic in combat and action, paving the way for Platoon, Saving Private Ryan and Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima films."
In a 2011 interview with Rotten Tomatoes, actor William Fichtner stated that he and his partner were silenced after seeing the film, stating that "the human experience was just so pointed; their journeys were so difficult, as life is sometimes. I remember after seeing it, walking down the street—I actually went with a girl on a date and saw The Deer Hunter, and we left the theater and walked for like an hour and nobody said anything; we were just kind of stunned about that."
The deaths of approximately 25 people who died playing Russian roulette were reported as having been influenced by scenes in the movie.
In 1996, The Deer Hunter was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
American Film Institute included the film as #79 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies, #30 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills, and #53 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition).
The film ranks 467th in the Empire magazine's 2008 list of the 500 greatest movies of all time, noting:
The New York Times placed the film on its "Best 1000 Movies Ever" list.
Jan Scruggs, a Vietnam veteran who became a counselor with the U.S. Department of Labor, thought of the idea of building a National Memorial for Viet Nam Veterans after seeing a screening of the film in March 1979, and he established and operated the memorial fund that paid for it. Director Cimino was invited to the memorial's opening.
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