The Deer Hunter

To celebrate Robert de Niro’s 80th birthday, the BBC broadcast Cimino’s The Deer Hunter last night (they also broadcast Cape Fear, but I didn’t watch that – partly because it didn’t start until midnight-thirty, and partly because I recall not particularly enjoying it when I first watched it).

Obviously I have The Deer Hunter on DVD, but I sat down to watch it anyway. I think that it was absolutely the perfect choice to show. Everyone has seen The Godfathers a million times. Therefore the rivals to show are either Once Upon A Time In America, or The Deer Hunter.

When we look at the canon of the 1970s, we tend to think of Coppola and Scorsese, but not Leone and Cimino. But I think that the four directors together created a connected concept – one of the forging of the United States, and how that was being lost.

Coppola did it with the Italians, as did Scorsese (who also made a couple of films on the Irish). Leone did it with the Jews, and Cimino did it with the Russians/Slavs –?bothin Heaven’s Gate and in The Deer Hunter.

The latter has been written about thousands of times, and really I am only repeating what many have written before. The vital thing to understand is that the key parts of this film are not set in Vietnam – even though it is these parts that everyone remembers. The majority of the film is set in Clairton, Pennsylvania; in the rust belt. Six young men work in the steel mill. It is hard, blue-collar work. Three of them (De Niro, Walken and John Savage) are heading for Vietnam. Three others (George Dzundza, Chuck Aspegren and John Cazale) will remain to work in the steel mill.

I had quite forgotten what a sensational episode is the the wedding between Steven and Angela. Cimino kind of repeats this in Heaven’s Gate, but not to such a great effect. What lifts the episode to greatness is, quite simply, the joy of watching De Niro, Streep, Walken and Cazale at the top of their game.

The fact that this is Cazale’s last film performance, with his partner Meryl Streep soon to care for him as he died from lung cancer, aged 43, gives it added poignancy.

The following day four of the six go deer hunting, and they return, somewhat the worse for wear, to a bar. Dzundza sits at the piano and plays a tinkly tune, just before there is a sudden jump cut to Vietnam a few months later. It is quite clearly, to my mind, the centrepoint of the film. It is a lament to a lost America and to an America that Cimino, Coppola, Scorsese and Leone could see was being lost. All four directors spent the 1970s trying, in their individual ways, to record that process in film. The result was some of the finest films to have been created in the history of the art. From The Godfather through to Apocalypse Now (Heaven’s Gate, Gangs Of New York ?and Once Upon A Time In America would come fractionally later) we have films that will be remembered for a long long time. Later iterations (Goodfellas, Casino) sit more, I think, with The Sopranos and The Wire. They are magnificent films, but they are not a part of this relatively short period that saw films in which the directors could see that what they were filming was about something that was not quite yet completely lost.