The Deer Hunter - Classic Movie Review

The Deer Hunter, Cimino's take on the Vietnam movie contrasts the comfort of every day life in America to the flip side as a Prisoner of War in Vietnam. The near three-hour narrative tracing the classic human parabola from wedding bliss to funeral blues, and the ultimate test of friendship.

We open in the hellish heat and sulphurous fumes of the Pennsylvania steel mills, where friends and co-workers Michael (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken), Stan (John Cazale), Steven (John Savage) and Axel (Chuck Aspergen) endure inhuman conditions for pay, night after night.

These are tough men, we are told. The weekly reward for the steelworkers is escape into the cool mountains, and Michael in particular is soon scampering across snow-capped peaks with a gazelle's grace. But, lest we forget that a ticket to heaven comes at a prix fixè, Michael tracks and kills a beautiful stag, as if nature itself must pay his tithe.

It's a film of striking and often startling contrasts, and Cimino doesn't once flinch from an unpromising gear change. Indeed, The Deer Hunter is distinguished by quite audacious transitions from high to low, light to dark.

At one point, Michael, abandoned in his motel room at night, suddenly appears at the other side of the frame, still shrouded in darkness; only when he steps forward into the light do we realise that it is now daytime and he is outside, standing in the shade, hiding from his friends.

And, famously, there is the sudden jolt into Vietnam. The hunting buddies, exhausted and exhilarated from a successful trip, come to rest around a piano played by George Dzunda's lovable bar owner; dimly, the rhythm of what sound like rotor blades underscore the pretty melody. Without warning we are in another world, helicopters rain napalm down on a green forest.

If, as Dante maintained, hell is composed of seven levels, we have just slipped down several stages at once.

At a time when patience was a given rather than a virtue, '70s audiences were happy to endure the inevitable longueurs - a 40-minute wedding production number that fails to forward the plot - because word-of-mouth had assured them that all hell would soon break loose.

And for cinema goers who had yet to be fed money shots and special effects, the notorious Russian Roulette sequence - where Prisoners of War Michael, Nick and Steven must face off against each other for the amusement of their Viet-Cong captors - which takes place early in the second hour, was the equivalent of a must-see, water-cooler moment.

Simply one of the most terrifying scenes in celluloid history, this sequence alone ensured that The Deer Hunter would become perhaps the most unlikely blockbuster of all time. When the film went on to dominate the 1978 Oscars - taking five awards including Best Film and Best Director - Cimino was heralded as the poster-child for the brave new world of American cinema. A man, it was supposed, who could do no wrong.

On his return from Vietnam, Michael's failure to reconnect with friends whom he once openly patronized is lent a genuinely tragic dimension. There is no way Michael could explain what he has seen, what he has lived through, even if he wanted to.

And in a movie that is practically spoilt for stand-out performances, Meryl Streep's luminous debut, John Cazale's last screen appearance, Christopher Walken's Oscar-winning breakthrough, De Niro is always central, manfully shouldering the film just as Michael carries the crippled Steven to safety. His work with Scorsese is more expansive, more celebrated, but Michael is De Niro's signature performance: the enigmatic, stoic, thoroughly Nietzschean hero who has not only appeared in various forms (see Heat's Neil McCauley) throughout his career, but one that we mere mortals can easily imagine is a close relation of the great man himself.

The Deer Hunter is a grueling film, an upsetting experience, as much an endurance test for the audience as it was for cast and crew fighting a private war on location in Thailand. And yet, from the justly ubiquitous theme music to Vilmos Zsigmondís rich and lyrical cinematography, The Deer Hunter is a film of enormous, if mostly melancholy, beauty.

As such, it contains a raw power to move, and in some cases, bait, audiences to extremes of emotion almost unparalleled in cinema. At the time this was an astonishingly ambitious attempt to dress a wound in the American psyche that was still fresh and weeping; 25 years on,The Deer Hunter deserves to be reclaimed as one of the most powerful humanist tracts ever committed to celluloid.

A simultaneously touching and harrowing experience that puts the audience directly in the shoes of one man's experience of Vietnam.

Taxi Driver - Movie Review - Classic Film of the Week

A compelling and unsettling film exploring many of the fears, aches, and dislocations of contemporary urban life.

Travis Bickle (Robert de Niro) is a lonely, frustrated, and disoriented young Vietnam veteran from the Midwest who is working as a night cabbie in Manhattan. He despises "Sin City" with all its pimps and prostitutes, pushers and perverts. As a taxi driver, he stays somewhat sealed off from this ugly external world. He exists in the private space of his room and his cab — two isolated realms serving as a womb. Travis is the anonymous man. The other people to whom he should normally relate in his development as a person have become constant irritants and challenges to his self-will. By the middle of the film, his womb has been transformed into a fantasy chamber giving him the only opportunity he has to assert himself as the center of the universe.

Director Martin Scorsese who did such a masterful job using New York City as a backdrop for Mean Streets again succeeds in capturing the frantic and frightening side of the metropolis. Whether the scene is set in the slummy East Village, as the Bellmore Cafeteria (a hangout for hack drivers) or at Columbus Circle, the picture is a continuing presentation of an oppressive urban soulscape — the ever unfriendly environment.

Travis prowls the city in his cab. The wretched tenements, the glare of traffic lights at night, the eerie vapors emanating from the streets — all combine to create a feeling for Manhattan as an evil octopus. We begin to feel claustrophobic — closed in and pressed upon. The atmosphere of the film is feverish with constant intimations of impending violence.

Travis is hungry for love and recognition. He aggressively inserts himself into the life of Susan (Cybill Shepherd), an attractive, bright, and socially conscious woman who is working at the campaign headquarters of Presidential candidate Charles Palatine (Leonard Harris). Their encounters at her office, over coffee in a restaurant, and on one date are both bizarre and extremely revealing. The relationship is doomed from the start. Seeing her as "an angel in this filthy mess," Travis puts Susan on a pedestal. When he discovers that she is something less than an angel, his despair deepens.

If he can no longer be an adoring prince, Travis wants to be a savior. He showers his affections upon Iris (Jodie Foster), a twelve-year-old hooker who is the property of Sport (Harvey Keitel), a self-obsessed pimp. The taxi driver offers Iris some money in hopes that she will leave the city and the degradation of her life as a prostitute. She laughingly tells him: "I don't know who's weirder — you or me." But we know.

One of the movie's more poignant scenes takes place one night at the Bellmore Cafeteria. Travis tries to convey to Wizard (Peter Boyle), a veteran cabbie, what he feels about the meaninglessness of his life. He struggles to into words his depression, anger, and bewilderment. Although Wizard is somewhat tuned into that same feeling, he can offer nothing except the suggestion of cheap thrills. This vignette works on a gut level; it puts before us in a very realistic way the many situations in our lives when we have played either the role of victim or adviser. And when the scene is over, we feel the sense of loss in both the failure to communicate and the botched opportunity to help a despondent friend.

Robert De Niro's performance as the nervous and psychopathic Travis is a tightrope act of sustained intensity. It is to the actor's credit that he can involve us so deeply with this person's disequilibrium and rage. De Niro doesn't allow us to distance or disassociate ourselves from this character. He places us in the cab and by the sheer insistence of his performance takes us along for the whole ride This is acting worthy of an Academy Award.

Although Taxi Driver contains an assassination attempt on a Presidential candidate, the movie is not about that subject. By taking us inside a killer's mind, it reveals a very important truth: most murders are little murders. What shocks is the ease with which basic human aches can add up to murder — the working out of private grudges thought political symbols (Travis tries to get back at Susan through Palatine) and the sudden anger which finds release against whoever is at hand (the stomach-turning carnage of the film's finale). Taxi Driver is not for those who are unable to handle cinematic violence.