Customer Reviews

The Deer Hunter [Blu-ray + DVD] (Universal's 100th Anniversary)

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Not having seen this movie in years, it was with some trepidation that I watched. Like many films of this stature, it can be difficult to view at times. Of course many will remember the time when the 3 best friends are captured by the Viet Cong and forced into games of Russian roulette. Knowing those scenes pretty well, equal focus should be placed on the long build up in the first act which shows how those friendships evolve.

There is no doubt Christopher Walken deserved his Oscar, but watch the byplay between De Niro's title character and that of Meryl Streep's who is the girlfriend of Nick (Walken) and Michael's (Robert De Niro) best friend. At first there are the glimses and subtle attraction. Michael is clearly smitten by Linda (Streep), but stays at a distance because of her relationship with Nick. Linda likes Michael but more like a brother or best friend. This relationship awkwardly changes, but while Michael has romance in mind, Linda still loves Nick. Yet she is also very lonely and torn by the fact that Michael is there and has always paid attention to her. This is certainly some good writing but the acting delivers this aching relationship in a profound way. Yes the movie is long, clocking in at over 3 hours and can be grueling at times, but this is a landmark film by any standard.

This new Blu ray combo pack Blu-ray/DVD combo pack presents the film in its 2.39:1 original aspect ratio with a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track. The disc also contains the following supplements:

Deleted and extended scenes
Commentary with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and film journalist Bob Fisher
100 Years of Universal: Academy Award Winners featurette

"The Deer Hunter" is a 1978 drama about the war in Vietnam. For people too young to remember, the Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975 and "reunification" followed the next year.

The first film about the Vietnam War appeared in 1968 with John Wayne directing and starring in "Green Beret" which was a typical war film, often depicted as glorifying the War. But most films about the war offered a very different version and in the next decade we had a number of excellent anti-war interpretations, including Oscar winning "Coming Home" (1978), "The Boys in Company C" (1978), the musical "Hair" (1979), the Emmy winning TV movie "Friendly Fire" (1979), Oscar winning "Apocalypse Now" (1979), and "First Blood" (1982).

As much as any film from this era, "Deer Hunter" received universal acclaim. The film won 5 Oscars (Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, Editing, Sound) and was nominated for 4 more (Actor, Actress, Cinematographer, Screenplay). It won 2 BAFTAs and was nominated for 7 more, one Golden Globe and 5 nominations. AFI lists it as #53 in the list of Greatest Movies of all time. FWIW - "Apocalypse Now" (1979) is #29 and "Platoon" (1986) is listed #59.

The film earned nearly $50 million making it #7 at the box office. The budget was about $15 million.

The film is distinguished by the terrific performances from Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep. De Niro was already a major star at the time ("The Godfather Part 2" and "Taxi Driver" preceded this film), but for Walken and Streep this was their first major role. Streep would earn her first of 17 Oscar nominations and Walken his first of 2.

While for some the film marked the start of a distinguished career, for John Cazale it was his last. The talented actor from "Dog Day Afternoon" and "The Godfather" (1972, 1974) films died of cancer on March 12, 1978 just after filming but 9 months before it came out. Cazale has the distinction of appearing in only 5 films but all of them were nominated for Best Picture.

FWIW - Cazale and Streep were romantically involved, and she insisted he not be fired when the producers learned he was ill.

The big box office winners in 1978 were "Grease", Superman", "Animal House", "Every Which Way But Loose", and "Heaven Can Wait." The big Oscar winner was "The Deer Hunter" with 5 wins and 4 other nominations. "Coming Home" won for Best Actor (Jon Voigt) and Actress (Jane Fonda). Other notable films that year were "Midnight Express", the first "Halloween", "The Boys from Brazil", the great musical "The Last Waltz", and "An Unmarried Woman".

After all the years and all the anti-war films since, the question really is whether or not the film stands the test of time. IMHO opinion, it does. The Russian Roulette sequences still creates a pit in my stomach, and the scene in the bar, as the friends spontaneously sing "God Bless America", still brings a tear to my eye.

Bottom line - if you haven't already seen this film, please do. If you have, you'll enjoy it again. This is a timeless treasure.

One of my all time favorite movies. Incredible story, amazing acting - especially Deniro and Walken (Deniro was robbed of the best actor award if you ask me, although Jon Voight was great in Coming Home too). Can't wait to see the deleted scenes and extended scenes. The slapping and hitting, by the way, is real during the Russian Roulette scene at the POW camp. DeNiro wanted them to really hit him so he get more emotionally involved in the scene. Amazing! Great movie and a must see. It's on AFI's top 100 movies of all time for a good reason.

The Deer Hunter took us from the streets of a steel town to Vietnam and back. It was an interesting piece on what happens to people who are subjected to constant stress. The story itself is probably no plausible but the stress levels that are depicted in the movie are real. I served in Vietnam for a year and a half and I can tell you the feel of the movie is spot on. If you haven't seen The Deer Hunter, please consider doing so by purchasing it on Amazon.Com. It's well worth the price of admission.

this is a great movie like no other with Christopher Walken earning his Best Supporting Actor Oscar and the final film that the great John Cazale (aka Fredo from The Godfather). Either way it is great to see this film coming to blu ray

Yes the film may contain artistry but this is pure Mussolini model American Fascism a love letter to a genocidal American Empire and a racist bag of slander against Vietnamese.
The whitewash of the genocidal extermination of 5 million Indochinese including 3.4million Vietnamese by Americans and the military of the world's leading imperial gangster nation...the USA !

HSM

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Critical Essay by Gloria Emerson

[The Deer Hunter is] a sick and manipulative film--remarkable only for its adolescent perceptions and wild selfindulgence--that is impressing many people as the truth, the real version of what the war was like in Vietnam. Cimino has done what no one else has succeeded in doing: he has rejected the immense suffering of the Vietnamese in the South, of the Vietnamese in the North, of the Americans who fought there, in favor of a story that suits his own longings and his own fantasies about men. Do not enrich him further by going to see The Deer Hunter.

In our desperation to explain our defeat in Vietnam, and to be comfortable with it, many people need a film like The Deer Hunter which shows the Americans in Vietnam as gallant, good, noble fellows pitted against the despicable, giggling and inhuman Asian monsters who do not, of course, value human life. It is the most racist film I have ever seen. The story of three friends, steelworkers from a small town in Pennsylvania, who are captured and forced to play Russian roulette by the Viet Cong, and who are each destroyed by the war, The Deer Hunter makes a mockery of the real pain, the real losses and the real nightmares of the survivors in all the armies. The film is the creation of a shrewd monster, a man of tremendous energy, ambition and staggering ignorance.

Using Russian roulette as his metaphor, Cimino is not bothered by the fact that this odious form of enforced suicide was not practiced by the Vietnamese and the Chinese who gambled, yes, but with cards or by playing mah-jongg. It is a stupid and offensive metaphor in terms of the American infantrymen in Vietnam who did not casually risk their lives.

The Deer Hunter sells us a version of the war, of American goodness, that we can comfortably swallow between our sobs. In the darkness of the movie houses, no one need feel guilty or ashamed of that long, long war. The hero, as played by Robert De Niro, is a strange man, almost a cartoon of a Hemingway figure, and his first name is Michael. It is Cimino's name and The Deer Hunter is his fantasy. (p. 540)

[If] only one sentence could be used as an indictment of Cimino's film--in which we see so much blood spurting across the screen during Russian roulette games--it is [Tom] Buckley [see excerpt above] who provides it. "The Deer Hunter does not examine cruelty, it exploits it," he said. And it is this which makes it an unforgivable film. (p. 541)

Gloria Emerson, "Oscars for Our Sins," in The Nation (copyright 1979 The Nation Associates, Inc.), Vol. 228, No. 18, May 12, 1979, pp. 540-41.