Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter runs 183 minutes, and it earns nearly every one of them. The film follows three Russian-American steelworkers from Clairton, Pennsylvania, who enlist in the army and are sent to Vietnam. What happens to them there, and what they carry home, is the whole of the movie.
It is a war film that spends its first hour at a wedding. That choice is the point.
Trailer, via StudiocanalUK.
Clairton, Pennsylvania, and a Wedding That Won’t Quit
The Deer Hunter is a 1978 American epic war drama, co-written and directed by Cimino. It stars Robert De Niro as Michael Vronsky, Christopher Walken as Nikanor “Nick” Chevotarevich, and John Savage as Steven Pushkov. John Cazale, Meryl Streep and George Dzundza fill out the supporting cast.
The story opens in Clairton, a working-class town on the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh. Mike, Steven and Nick work in a steel mill. They hunt deer with co-workers Stan and Axel, and drink at the bar run by their friend John.
Steven is marrying Angela, who is pregnant by another man. Mike and Nick are close friends and roommates. Nick dates Linda, and Mike is secretly in love with her.
The wedding sequence at a veterans hall is long, loud and full of detail. Linda catches the bouquet. She accepts Nick’s spontaneous marriage proposal. At the bar, the friends meet a traumatized Green Beret who curtly dismisses their questions about Vietnam.
The Promise and the One Shot
After a drunken run through the neighborhood, Nick asks Mike to promise never to leave him stranded in Vietnam. It is the film’s load-bearing line, and Cimino plants it early.
The next day the group takes a final hunting trip. Mike kills a deer with “one shot,” a code he proudly lives by. Back in town late that night, they celebrate in John’s closed bar. The mood turns somber when John plays Chopin’s sixth Nocturne, Op. 15, No. 3 in G minor, on the bar piano.
Then the film cuts to Vietnam. Mike, now a Green Beret, crosses paths with Nick and Steven by coincidence. The three are imprisoned by the Viet Cong and forced into Russian roulette while their jailers wager on the outcome.
Steven fires his round into the ceiling. He is forced into a submerged cage in the river, with rats and the bodies of previous victims. When Mike and Nick’s turn comes, Mike talks the captors into loading extra rounds, raising his own odds of dying.
A Cast Built on One Last Performance
The performances are the reason The Deer Hunter still holds. Walken won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Nick. De Niro was paid one million dollars for the role, after Roy Scheider withdrew two weeks before filming started over creative differences.
De Niro prepared by socializing with steelworkers in local bars and visiting their homes. He called it the most physically exhausting film of his career.
- De Niro as Mike, the stoic one who lives by “one shot”
- Walken as Nick, the amiable friend who asks for a promise
- Savage as Steven, the groom who fires into the ceiling
- Cazale as Stan, in his final film role
- Streep as Linda, whose part was negligible in the screenplay until Cimino told her to write her own lines
Cazale’s scenes were all filmed first. He had terminal cancer. The studio wanted to dismiss him, but Streep, his romantic partner at the time, and Cimino threatened to withdraw if he was released. Streep has said De Niro paid for Cazale’s insurance because he wanted him in the film. Cazale died shortly after filming wrapped and never saw the finished movie.
What the Makers Say Now
The film’s portrait of the Vietnamese has not aged well, and producer Spikings says so plainly. Spikings, proud of the film, told interviewers he regrets how the Vietnamese are shown.
“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 …”
Walken said the historical context was not paramount during production. “In the making of it, I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning Vietnam!” De Niro agreed. “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 Deeley defended the film’s aims. “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 Numbers Behind the Film
The Deer Hunter was 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 bought it and hired Cimino, who rewrote it with Deric Washburn, moving the Russian roulette into the Vietnam War.
The production went over budget and over schedule, costing $15 million. EMI Films released it in other territories. Universal Pictures handled distribution in the United States and Canada.
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| Runtime | 183 minutes |
| Production cost | $15 million |
| Box office gross | $49 million |
| Academy Award nominations | 9 |
| Academy Award wins | 5 |
At the 51st Academy Awards, The Deer Hunter won Best Picture, Best Director for Cimino, Best Supporting Actor for Walken, Best Sound, and Best Editing. It grossed $49 million. Critics and audiences praised the direction, the cast, the screenplay, the realistic themes and tones, and the cinematography.
Where the Film Still Cuts
The Russian roulette scenes are the ones people remember, and they are also the ones the film has been attacked for. The Deer Hunter presents the game as a Viet Cong practice. That claim is contested. What the film does with the device is dramatic, not documentary.
The stronger case for The Deer Hunter is structural. Cimino spends an hour on a wedding, a bar, a hunting trip and a piano piece before he shows a single frame of combat. By the time the film cuts to Vietnam, the audience knows exactly what is being lost. Most war films build toward the battle. This one builds a life first, then breaks it.
The weakest stretch is the middle. Once the three men are in the hands of the Viet Cong, the film’s grip loosens, and Cimino’s instinct for the operatic sometimes overrides his instinct for the true.
What holds it together is the promise. Nick asks Mike never to leave him stranded in Vietnam, and the rest of the film turns on that word. It is a devastating close, and it lands because Cimino earned it an hour earlier in a Pennsylvania bar.
The supporting cast matters more than their screen time suggests. Dzundza’s John is the film’s warmth. Cazale’s Stan is its comedy and, given what was happening off camera, its quiet grief. Streep took a role the screenplay barely wrote and made Linda a person.
The Verdict on The Deer Hunter
The Deer Hunter is not a subtle film. It is 183 minutes long, it goes over budget and over schedule, and it makes claims about the war that Spikings now regrets. It is also one of the few American films of its era that treats working-class life as worthy of an hour of screen time before the violence starts.
The film’s tagline calls it “One of the most important and powerful films of all time!” That is marketing, but the record backs up the scale of it: nine Oscar nominations, five wins, $49 million at the box office, and a Best Supporting Actor statue for Walken. Cazale never saw it. That fact sits over the whole movie now.
What matters most is the promise between Mike and Nick. It is the spine of The Deer Hunter, and it is why the film outlasts its own controversy. Deeley said the film was about how individuals respond to pressure, and the answer is different for each of the three men. That is the part worth watching, and it is the part that still works.
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