THE DEER HUNTER: Blu-ray (Universal/EMI, 1978) Universal Home Video

BEST PICTURE - 1978

Critics have noted that Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) is a story divided into three rather interminably long acts. In its day, the film received unanimous glowing praise for its forthright depiction of the hell that was the Vietnam war, and a Best Picture Oscar to boot. Cimino, who had cut his teeth on shooting sixty-second commercials for Madison Ave., before moving into the director’s chair with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), certainly knocked one out of the park with The Deer Hunter. Then, as now, Hollywood loves a golden boy, and in the winter of 1979, Cimino could do absolutely no wrong – at least, on the surface. In Michael Cimino, we perhaps have the perfect embodiment of the great American tragedy; a man, for whom the instant flush of accolades and sycophantic praise went right to his head; Cimino’s passion for his next project after The Deer Hunter – the ill-fated and studio-sinking leviathan, Heaven’s Gate (1980), putting an inexplicable period to his very short reign as Hollywood’s hottest director.  Indeed, after Heaven’s Gate, Cimino’s reputation never recovered. He had only six more movies left to make – none, to recapture the glory or promise that, only a year before had seemed so swiftly secured.

The Deer Hunter actually came together because of a fortuitous alliance begun in 1968, when the record company EMI, established its film apparatus, fronted by producers, Barry Spikings and Michael Deeley. The newly amalgamated picture-making company had planned to kick start their spate of projects with The Man Who Came to Play; a movie about Vegas gambling, written by Louis Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker. In fact, EMI had already paid $19,000 for the rights. Meanwhile, the subject of Vietnam, while still very much a bitter epitaph to most Americans, was an anathema in Hollywood that no studio would even consider as viable box office. Impressed by Cimino’s first movie, Deeley brought him on board as a script doctor, to flesh out the principal characters in The Man Who Came to Play. But what followed would be anything but smooth sailing. Depending on the source being consulted, the legend goes, Cimino sincerely questioned the need for the Russian roulette sequence that Redeker absolutely insisted was essential to the story.  For 6 weeks, Cimino co-wrote with Deric Washburn; the two, having previously collaborated on the screenplay for Silent Running (1972). Alas, this time out, the relationship quickly soured. Reportedly, Cimino would phone in his dialogue and story suggestions while on the road, scouting locations. However, when Cimino returned to Hollywood, he quickly discovered what Washburn had created bore no earthly resemblance to his own prose.

“It was like it was written by somebody who was ... mentally deranged,” Cimino later commented, confronting Washburn about the draft. But according to Washburn, the screenplay went through several drafts with amicable exchanges between he and Cimino. Washburn had not consulted veterans to write what would become The Deer Hunter, nor had he done any real research on the war, basing his situations on the combat footage being played out on the nightly news. At the end of this heady gestation period, Washburn suggests Cimino, along with associate producer, Joann Carelli, took him to dinner whereupon he was unceremoniously informed he was fired. So, did Cimino ‘steal’ the screenplay for The Deer Hunter? Hmmm. Meanwhile, Deeley thought the Cimino/Washburn draft had greatly improved Redeker/Garfinkle’s material.  Then, the central protagonist had been Merle – a vet, having sustained a terrible injury while in active service that damaged him psychologically and made him prone to violent outbursts in civilian life. In the Cimino/Washburn revision, these traits were split into three characters – buddies, who grew up in the same industrial town and gone off to Vietnam, never again to return home ‘normal’ – or rather, forever changed by the experience. Merle became Mike (eventually played by Robert DeNiro), the character inheriting the former’s guts and fortitude, and, Nick (Christopher Walken) his counterpoint, suffering crippling and nightmarish PSD aftereffects. Meanwhile, Washburn appealed his case to the Writers’ Guild; their arbitration awarding him sole ‘Screenplay by…’ credit, with Garfinkle and Redeker sharing a ‘Story by’ credit, along with Cimino and Washburn; a decision that Deeley believes did Garfinkle and Redeker “less than justice.” Cimino too was outraged, but powerless to contest the decision.

For authenticity, much of The Deer Hunter was shot on location in Thailand - six months abroad, with another few weeks in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Ohio, amalgamated into the fictional town of Clairton. In Thailand, Cimino launched into his most brutal vignette: the torture of Nick, Steven and Mike by the Viet Cong, and the nerve-jangling game of Russian roulette. The sequence, shot under the most oppressive natural conditions, employed real rats and mosquitoes, with De Niro, Walken, and Savage, half submerged in a bamboo cage on the River Kwai. The viciousness with which the roulette game was played was the result of Cimino insisting that the person cast in the part of the captor have a natural aversion to Americans. Back home, Cimino faced a terrible realization: co-star, John Cazale, had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. To be near her boyfriend at the time, Meryl Streep agreed to play the rather thankless part of Linda, who fancies Nick at the start of the picture, but steadily gravitates her desires to Mike upon his return from the war. There appears to be some discrepancy as to who knew how ill Cazale was. Certainly, Streep did, and, as the rumor goes, Cimino too. Indeed, Cimino deliberately shot out of sequence to accommodate his ailing co-star, so as not to overtax his waning physical strength. Evidently, someone alerted EMI to the crisis; the studio, threatening to have Cazale’s part recast – a decision narrowly averted when Streep and Cimino both went to bat in the actor’s defense. Cazale stayed in and delivered his final performance without ever seeing the fruits of his labors or the success of the picture. John Cazale died on March 12, 1978. He was only 42. 

There was little time to mourn. Deeley’s line producer, Robert Relyea had bowed out without giving a reason, leaving Cimino The Deer Hunter’s de facto producer for a brief wrinkle in time. Relyea’s replacement, John Peverall settled into the post without further incident. After the Thailand shoot wrapped, production moved to Cleveland’s historic, St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral for five days to lens the wedding of Steven (John Savage) and Angela (Rutanya Alda). As the movie’s prologue is supposedly taking place in the fall (although it was actually shot in the dead heat of summer) leaves were stripped from all the deciduous trees lining the street; cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, employing a desaturated color scheme to simulate autumn.  The wedding reception is fraught with foreshadowing for the tragic circumstances soon to befall Mike, Nick and Steven – a chance meeting at the bar with a returning war vet who is unable to articulate the severity of the war to satisfy their inquiring minds, and, capped off by the ill-fated wedding toast, whereupon the bride and groom are meant to drink the wine in their gold chalices without spilling a drop, signifying a long and happy life together. Regrettably, a few drops escape Angela’s cup and taint her wedding gown – a very bad omen.

To keep costs at a minimum, Cimino cast the church’s Father Stephen Kopestonsky to officiate the actual ceremony; the production, moving to Lemko Hall for the reception. Cimino jam-packed the hall with amateur extras, plying them with real liquor and beer to get everyone in the mood for the rambunctious festivities. The director also instructed his production manager to inform the Russian extras to bring their own gift-wrapped boxes as props to double as wedding presents. Evidently, something was lost in translation, as the extras not only brought boxes to the reception, but actually bought real gifts to place inside of them. Cimino had originally planned for the wedding to occupy the first twenty minutes of the movie. In the final edit, it ran almost an hour. At this juncture, Deeley broke a sweat. The movie’s shooting schedule was not even half over and Cimino was already well beyond his initial budget. Moving to Mingo Junction in Ohio, $25,000 was spent constructing a bar near the local steel mill. Securing a $5 million insurance policy, U.S. Steel allowed Cimino to shoot his actors toiling inside their furnace room. Afterward, the bar set was left behind and became a real-life local watering hole for the actual men who worked at the mill.  

Initially budgeted at $4 million, Cimino had spent in excess of $13 million to shoot The Deer Hunter - and this, before the arduous post-production process. As film editor, Peter Zinner began to sift through a staggering 600,000 feet of raw footage, EMI’s Spikings and Deeley launched an aggressive marketing campaign. Cimino’s first cut of The Deer Hunter ran a whopping 3 ½ hours. But Deeley and Spikings were unnerved by its lengthy run time. “We were thrilled by what we saw,” Deeley later declared, “…and knew (it) was a riveting film.” Nevertheless, Universal Studio executives, Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg were hardly as enthusiastic. Acknowledging that, at its current run time, Uni had lost one third of its screenings – and thus, the income to be derived for distributors, and profit participants – Deeley agreed with Wasserman to have the movie pared down…slightly. But the process by which Cimino was convinced to sacrifice anything he had already poured his blood, sweat and tears into, proved nightmarish, with on-going feuds arising from that moment, right up until Oscar night. Cimino reasoned that if the Academy honored his movie at all, they, apparently the arbitrators of good taste, would also validate his own faith in the project. To satisfy Cimino and Universal, the studio reluctantly agreed to release two competing versions of The Deer Hunter into theaters; Cimino’s original 3 ½ hr. director’s cut, and a slimmed down 2 ½ hour ‘studio-sanctioned’ release that retained the movie’s impact, but trimmed many sequences without actually discarding whole scenes.

Viewed today, The Deer Hunter remains a somewhat overblown and meandering, brutally self-indulgent and overly melodramatic exercise. Despite some superlative acting and honest reflections on the horrors of the Vietnam war, The Deer Hunter registers as more as static snapshot than a living testament to those tragically overlooked and unfairly condemned American martyrs, who spilled their blood upon a distant battlefield, seemingly without justice or even acknowledgement for their sacrifices. Personally, I have never much cared for The Deer Hunter, though I can certainly appreciate the individual elements gone into making it. If only the shemozzle between Cimino, Washburn, Garfunkle, and, Redeker did not appear to have seeped into the actual script, excruciatingly translated to the screen. The Deer Hunter is atmospheric, but uniformly unsympathetic. The wedding sequence is, frankly, oppressive - or, as BBC film critic, Mark Kermode once astutely summarized, "pitched somewhere between shrieking hysteria and somnambulist somberness." The rest of the movie sustains its grim reality. But this too comes to grate on our nerves rather than burrow itself into our social conscience.  Point blank: the picture is just too darn long.

Act One establishes the enduring - and some might suggest, endearing - camaraderie between a group of American steel workers in the rough-hewn working class mid-western town of Clairton, Pennsylvania. The boys are preparing for two rites of passage simultaneously: a marriage ceremony and their pending military service. Robert DeNiro headlines a stellar cast as Michael Vronsky – a stoic loner whose home fires burn for Linda (Meryl Streep), the girl of his best friend, Nick Chevotarovich (Christopher Walken). Linda comes from an abusive home. And although she remains Nick's gal on the surface, she harbors a secretive passion to belong to Michael instead. This lover’s triangle is fleshed out much later in the film's epilogue. But for now, the wedding of a third solider of mis-fortune; Steven (John Savage) to his beloved Angela (Rutanya Alda) is the focus of our story. As a rule, The Deer Hunter is about a fraternity of men. The women play only incidental parts at best, particularly Angela, who is already pregnant by another man, but genuinely loved by Steven nonetheless. Angela spills a few drops of red wine on her wedding gown, an ominous precursor to the lifelong unhappiness she will endure after Steven returns from combat a broken man - both mentally and physically.

Another precursor of the nightmare that is to unfold in all of their lives comes when Michael and Nick are introduced to a returning U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who refuses to acknowledge their praise for his heroism. Unable to comprehend the horrors this man has seen (and therefore unwilling, or perhaps even unable to discuss them without suffering a complete breakdown), Michael and Nick take the soldier at face value. An unflattering confrontation breaks out, narrowly averted by mutual friends, Axel (Chuck Aspegren) and John (George Dzundza). After the wedding, and shortly before the boys go off on one last hunting trip together, Nick ask Linda to marry him. She reluctantly agrees, but later, drunken and confused, Nick has second thoughts. He begs Michael not to leave him in Vietnam should anything happen to him 'over there.' Michael vows they will both return home safely. From this golden epoch, the movie plunges - rather awkwardly - into the thick of a war-torn village attacked by U.S. helicopters for harboring communist sympathizers. Michael witnesses an NVA soldier (Vitoon Winwitoon) assassinate a South Vietnamese woman (Phip Manee) fleeing with her baby. He counters with a hailstorm of bullets. Presumably separated for some time since their deployment, Michael, Nick and Steven renew their friendship amidst this torturous carnage. They are captured and thrown into a bamboo cage, half submersed in the filthy river. Above them is a tattered hut that holds even more diabolical amusements for their sadistic guards (Ding Santos, Krieng Chaiyapuk, Ot Palapoo, Choc Chai Mahasoke) who force Nick, Steven and Michael to play a game of Russian roulette.

On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Steven aims the gun high and grazes his temple with the bullet that ought to have blown his head off. He is punished for defying death with incarceration in the watery pit below, teeming with vermin that begin to gnaw at his bare legs. Meanwhile, Michael and Nick are forced to play roulette against one another. Michael convinces the guards to let him go solo, using three bullets instead of one. He then seizes the moment to kill their captors before rescuing shell-shocked Nick and Steven; the three men, floating down river on a large tree branch. By chance an American helicopter spies them in the water and attempts a rescue. Regrettably, only Nick is saved. In his weakened condition, Steven falls back into the water, breaking both legs with Michael dives in after him. Carrying Steven to friendly lines, Michael resigns his commission in the army after it is concluded that both Steven's legs will have to be amputated. Meanwhile Nick, who has suffered severe amnesia, aimlessly wanders through Saigon's red-light district. He is induced by a champagne intoxicated Frenchman, Julien Grinda (Pierre Segui) to partake in a game of Russian roulette for money. Pointing the gun at the other contestant first and then at himself, Nick insights a riot among the betting crowd.

Michael returns home where he maintains a very low profile while struggling with his own feelings. He thinks about Nick and Steven all the time, and eventually decides to visit Angela who is withered with anxiety and exhaustion. She sends Michael to the veteran's hospital where Steven confides he has been receiving large amounts of cash from Saigon. Michael suspects Nick is behind these payments. Haunted by his broken promise to Nick (leaving him behind), Michael attempts to calm himself with another deer hunt. Only this time, he is incapable of taking another life - even that of a dumb animal. Bringing Steven home from the hospital, Michael assesses he will never be free of his inner demons until he can fulfill his promise to Nick. With great reluctance, Michael returns to Saigon as a civilian. He tracks down Nick who has made a lot of money playing Russian roulette. But Nick is already lost to him, having succumbed to a total mental obliteration. Michael tries to reach Nick's subconscious and does so moments before Nick picks up the roulette gun and shoots himself in the head. Michael brings Nick's body home. He rekindles his friendship with Linda as their friends sing 'God Bless America' and toast Nick's memory.

The Deer Hunter benefits from some genuinely fine acting. Even the subordinate players do their part. There is an affecting intimacy among this rather large ensemble that helps pull together an otherwise very loosely structured narrative with far too many holes in its storytelling to sustain our attentions through its 183-minute run time. Director, Cimino pulls no punches in his utterly grim depictions of war. But his reflections seem, at least in retrospect, ever so slightly pretentious, rather than purposeful, or even focused, for that matter. Undoubtedly, the revelry during Steven and Angela’s wedding is designed as counterbalance to the tragedy that unravels in Acts Two and Three. Yet, The Deer Hunter just seems too frequently engrossed in its own naval-gazing mise-en-scene, getting lost in the conflict, but without resolution. Despite its Best Picture Oscar win, The Deer Hunter is hardly perfect entertainment – or even entertaining. Its subject matter weighs heavily on the mind, though not entirely as a solemn reminder that war is, indeed, hell, but as a harbinger of meandering storytelling that goes on…and on…and on…until both the mind and the bottom have been sufficiently numbed.

Universal's Blu-ray is robust with bold, rich and detailed color fidelity. Flesh tones are appropriately cooler. Some minor DNR has been applied in an attempt to homogenize the grain in Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography. I sincerely wish Uni would leave well enough alone and just render their discs competently to reflect the intent of the organic film experience. This is smoother than that, but not to the point where we veer into images that appear less film-like and more video-based. Most of the image is beautifully contrasted, with deep solid blacks and clean whites. Universal has remastered the audio in 5.1 DTS and the results are fairly impressive. At the time of filming, Cimino was particularly interested in the advancements made by the Dolby recording process, and his care and attention paid to the original sound mix then, advances with all the bells and whistles of modern-age technology. Bass is most impressive. Dialogue is clean and crisp. Extremely disappointing for Uni to avoid providing us with any worthwhile extras. We get the old imported audio commentary, featuring Zsigmond and journalist, Bob Fischer. There are a few badly deteriorated deleted snippets excised from the film. These are presented in 480i and look it.  Bottom line: The Deer Hunter is heavy going almost from the moment the main titles fade and the action begins. This Blu-ray has been competently rendered but won’t win any awards. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

3

VIDEO/AUDIO

4

EXTRAS

1