The Deer Hunter is a film of considerable virtues that go beyond being the right film at the right time and winning a tall stack of industry awards. For acting, atmosphere and general realism the film gets very high marks. We invest considerable emotion in the characters, some of which is repaid handsomely. The interesting steel-town setting with its Russian Orthodox neighborhood is shown in absorbing detail, yet our attention is firmly focused on just two or three characters. Most of the opening hour is devoted to a jubilant wedding celebration. We get to know the character of our working-class heroes without learning most of their last names.

That extended opening is followed by a jarring cut to a harrowing Vietnam sequence, a ragged jumble of brutality and torture. A brief, frantic horrorshow of combat is followed by a suspense sequence that forms the thematic center of The Deer Hunter - Russian Roulette. As if adopting the game's suicidal madness as a lifestyle, one of the friends keeps playing it afterwards for profit, as Saigon collapses around him.

The Deer Hunter has what many 70s movies were lacking: Heroic characters fighting and suffering for friendship, honor, love and patriotism. All three of them walk through fire but only one comes out the other side as a whole person; Vietnam is seen, fairly enough, as a place of physical and psychological scarring. The film also celebrates life back home, which may be crude and rude but also includes honest work in the steel mill and a grateful home-town girl waiting for one's return. Even a marriage shattered by disability looks as if it will make a comeback.

Savant saw the film new in 1978 and had a different reaction. I agreed with the basis of the story on a personal level, but everything else about Michael Cimino's 'important film' seemed wrong. It was a reaction to the film's ideas and the lessons it taught, and not just a rejection of its 'uplifting' ending. I still react the same way - The Deer Hunter slickly pushes the same old blather about honor and presents a story that grows increasingly pretentious.

Michael Cimino's calculated direction starts off the show beautifully, with a captivating slice-of-reality ethnic wedding. Then he makes directorial noises that both give away his game and reveal how little he has to say.

As is typical with most 'honest, emotional' accounts of war, The Deer Hunter turns out to be more old-fashioned than supposedly old-fashioned pictures like The Four Feathers. Buddies go off to war with dreams of glory. Some make it and some don't, but the ideal of glory in War is upheld. No matter how strongly the film says that anybody could crack up, we're encouraged to see that some guys are just more heroic than others. One fellow becomes a (rather exotic) mental case because of the strain. Another is ground down by the pressure and trauma. As we identify so closely with them, our loyalties go immediately to the survivor, the man of action who answers brutality in kind and can make horrible but necessary decisions under pressure, for both himself and others. In other words, one soldier out of three has the right stuff, and the other two get what they get because of their basic characters. Not us. We stay with the main hero, and return with medals, a snappy ranger beret and a license to bed willing Meryl Streep.

In other words, this 'progressive' war movie is the old BS in a different package. The tough survivors are the real men, and the others had unfortunate but fatal weaknesses.

The Vietnam sequence is the strongest in the movie. Cimino throws us into the action and not allowed to get our bearings. Jarring discontinuities jump us ahead in the story, forcing us to fill in a lot of blanks, fast. Years have gone by and the three are seasoned soldiers. Michael (De Niro) has turned into Hawkeye Of The Rice Paddies, or The Man With No Dog Tags. His outfit apparently wiped out, Michael plays possum until a Viet Cong is distracted by the act of shooting a civilian woman and her baby. Then Michael grabs a convenient flame thrower and incinerates him. We see a glimpse of what might be pigs fighting over and devouring the baby's body. It's all too fast to tell for sure.

Then time stands still for the next extended scene, the forced Russian Roulette in captivity. The Deer Hunter seems to want us to think that RR was the rage in Vietnam, both among the V.C. and in secret betting parlors back in the slums of Saigon. The unbearable tension in this scene was too much for many viewers; I can remember feeling the adrenaline rise in a packed preview audience. It's personally threatening, and after one has crossed a certain unmarked threshold of emotional acceptance, details of credibility don't count.

The Deer Hunter's narrative drive has so far been maintained by keeping us off balance and under-informed. But from here on in the lack of substantial exposition works against Cimino. Unanswered questions build up until events become absurd. Michael's final return to Vietnam makes little or no sense on any level but wish-fufillment.

Things we ask ourselves: Why does nobody worry about stray bullets in these games of RR? All we see are a couple of bystanders leaning a bit when the gun is pointed in their direction. Why would the Viet Cong for a single moment permit one of their enemy to take hold of a loaded weapon?

(SPOILERS) Why does straight-shooting pragmatist Michael attend the illicit RR game in Saigon, which we are led to believe carries an inordinately high cover charge? Doesn't it strain believability that he happens to go the same night Nick comes by?

(SPOILERS) Why doesn't Michael find out what happens to his buddies, to whom he is so obviously dedicated? One is clearly evacuated in a chopper, with a leg wound. The other is last seen riding a jeep back to U.S. territory. By his elevation in rank it looks as if Michael goes right back into service. Back home, why is Michael shocked to find out that Steven is alive and returned? How can he possibly return to 'Nam? Is he in or out of the Army when he does? Does a longer version answer these questions?

None of these questions would be relevant if The Deer Hunter were giving us something substantive on other levels. But what we're fed is mostly symbolic pap. We've already established Hawkeye, I mean Michael as a true hunting spirit of the woods, a superior man reared in a steel mill but possessed of the gentlemanly graces to charm Meryl Streep's golden goddess of the supermarket. Now he goes out on another hunting trip. Cue more noble Russian choir music as the godlike hero communes with the cloudy mountaintops. He's attained a higher level of wisdom, see, and lets the mighty stag go in peace - just the kind of ennobling fable that gives war a purpose.

It's pap, I tells ya, the kind of ur-superman stuff that Leni Riefenstahl helped preach in pro-Aryan mountain climbing movies. This doesn't want to be as provocative as it might sound, but had the Nazis conquered the world, and saw the need to make a feel-good movie about how tough it was to eradicate all those 'stubborn lower races' on other continents, it might have a few things in common with The Deer Hunter. Being an unwilling warrior who does his duty, why, what man's destiny could be greater?

The definitive answers to all this are probably in print somewhere, but Savant can't help but think that the Russian Roulette motif in The Deer Hunter is related to that famous newsreel shot of the South Vietnamese police officer executing a suspected Viet Cong with a gunshot to the head, the one with the fountain of blood similar to the effect seen here. The footage is a key image in the antiwar documentary Hearts and Minds.

In all fairness, The Deer Hunter does have a hint of equal-opportunity atrocities. The Viet Cong are shown only as savage killers enamored of gruesome and inhuman tortures, but when the boys are in the river we're given a glimpse of a helicopter flying overhead with somebody clinging on underneath. Is airborne rescuing somebody else, or do they happen to be in the vicinity because they're having fun murdering captured V.C. by dropping them from great heights?

For its ending the picture dissolves into emotional mush. All the crude and rude types are humbled and brought to tears by a funeral, until we have a 'spontaneous' sing-song of God Bless America. Despite the solid attempt by the cast to make it work, it's still using 'the patriotism card' to bring down the curtain. All the old themes have been recycled in new wrappings, but it's still an empty enterprise.

The Deer Hunter is really an American version of a German Heimat (homeland) film, one that posits rural and conservative values as meaningful and worldly and intellectual concerns as an illusion. The cast of The Deer Hunter seem ready to return to their jobs (while those jobs still exist - the outside world will impinge eventually) and forget about everything else. F___ the war and let's have coffee and scrambled eggs.

The Deer Hunter still dazzles with its performances. The actors create the characters out of whole cloth, and Cimino's fluid direction finds an excellent balance between stand-here-do-this blocking and naturalistic improvisation. John Cazale is excellent at portraying a whining sad sack, the weakest and least principled of the group - it's a shame that he only seemed to play this kind of character in films. Christopher Walken is intelligent but also vulnerable and reasonably sensitive - it seems sort of a cheat that his transformation from human to zombie is glossed over so quickly. He carries the story's most difficult role and barely makes it work. Meryl Streep is the local gem one finds behind lunch counters or otherwise buried in small towns, often quite happily. The one-two punch of this film and TV's Holocaust put her way up front in the list of hot actresses. She mostly rides the film out with her poise and disarming smile; we have a hard time with the character every time she's asked to convince us that her Linda isn't very bright. Everything about Streep projects intelligence.

De Niro carries the lead role with quiet dignity. The part does most of the work and he just has to stay on top of it. The 'youthful exuberance' of running through the streets naked now seems like a stunt, and De Niro's attempts to give Michael an unyielding downside don't work too well either. When he browbeats and chastizes the lamely infantile Stosh (Cazale), we have to conclude that Michael is a natural leader granted right of judgment over his buddies - even to the extent of pulling the trigger on poor Stosh to teach him a lesson.

George Dzundza and Chuck Aspergren fill out the roster of small town buddies. Rutanya Alda has considerable screen time overjoyed in the first half and depressed in the second. Shirley Stoler (The Honeymoon Killers) turns a dozen closeups into an interesting fringe performance. Look sharp to catch a few glimpses of the charming Amy Wright (The Accidental Tourist) as a spirited bridesmaid.

Universal's Legacy Series Edition of The Deer Hunter finally presents the show in an acceptable video version. Savant had given up on the title in the 1990s -- every transfer, even laserdisc versions, looked terrible. I saw a bit of at least one DVD that wasn't much of an improvement. This edition is an excellent opportunity to check out the celebrated picture and form one's own opinion. The year after Cimino's film came out, fans of Apocalypse Now complained that it didn't get Best Picture because it was preceded by a Vietnam war Oscar winner. Coppola's phantasmagoria is a lumpy and politically-charged puzzle with its own pieces missing, but it did what The Deer Hunter only pretended to do, and that's say something coherent about the War.

The Deer Hunter is of course also known as the success that launched Cimino's Heaven's Gate. That debacle is singlehandedly credited for bringing down a studio and killing off 70s adult 'director's movies' in favor of the Spielberg-Lucas toyland and the corporate pablum we get today.

The two-disc set is thin on extras, but the three-hour film has happily not been bit-compromised by trying to jam too much on one disc. The feature is accompanied by a commentary with film Journalist Bob Fisher and cameraman Vilmos Zsigmond. Zisgmond's communcation skills have improved since the 1970s and he says a lot worth hearing, once one gets beyond his raspy voice. Thankfully, he does talk about more than just how each scene was shot from a camera point of view. As has been reported elsewhere, we find out that the Pennsylvania mountains were really filmed in Washington State.

Disc two has almost nothing on it. A misleadingly titled 'deleted and extended scenes' extra is instead a selection of a few (very long) alternate camera takes in workprint form. It drags on quite a bit, showing us some moments that are obviously first tries before the actors have fully warmed up. A trailer with bad color and some press-release text production notes are it for the extras. It looks as if other material fell through at the last minute. Amazon.com still lists two items not included on the disc: Acceptance of Best Picture Award and Anatomy of a Scene. The disc comes in a handsome and durable 'little Golden Book' package that promises a lot more.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, The Deer Hunter rates:
Movie: Very Good with reservations
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo)
Supplements: Audio Commentary with Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, Deleted and Extended Scenes, Trailer
Packaging: 2 discs in heavy plastic and card Book form
Reviewed: August 28, 2005