In 1891 the children of the Beach Street Industrial School near the docks on Manhattan’s lower West Side voted by secret ballot on whether or not they wanted, each morning, to salute the American flag. The children were Italian, Czech, Jewish, German, Irish, and black. The vote was 98 per cent in favor of saluting. In The Children of the Poor, Jacob Riis has recorded a typical morning salute, the flag carried to the principal’s desk, the “little ones” rising, “grimy little hands laid on as many hearts,” declaring with one voice: “We turn to our flag as the sunflower turns to the sun! We give our heads! and our hearts!” Then “with a shout that can be heard around the corner”: “To our country! One country, one language, one flag.” “No one can hear it,” Riis says, “and doubt that the children mean every word.”

This kind of ardent patriotism, rather out of fashion today, is an important strand in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. Whatever the cause, the film seems to have hit a nerve, becoming overnight the object of the most bitter controversy, dividing critical opinion almost as sharply as did the Vietnam war which, in part, is its subject. The cleavage is not on purely ideological grounds, but the “anti-war” group, “custodian of the nation’s conscience” during the war and bidding fair to become custodian of the nation’s memory of the war now that it is over, is especially incensed. Gloria Emerson, winner of the National Book Award for her Vietnam work, Winners and Losers, considers the film an abomination. Frances FitzGerald, winner of the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and Bancroft Prize for History for her Vietnam study, Fire in the Lake, called the movie “a fraud . . . a grade-B Western . . . wholly implausible. . . .”

The controversy has been internationalized, with American critics of the movie joined by the Soviet Union. At the West Berlin Film Festival in late February, the USSR withdrew its delegation and all its films in protest at The Deer Hunter, declaring it contains episodes that “insult the heroic people of Vietnam,” and that this was particularly offensive now that Vietnam has become subject to a “new barbaric aggression on the part of China.” Russia was followed out of the festival by the delegations of East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Cuba. At the Belgrade Film Festival, long a Third World rostrum, the Russians also protested vigorously. But there, interestingly, festival director Milutin Colic, Yugoslavia’s leading film authority, rose to The Deer Hunter‘s defense, saying it was a “very human film,” a “requiem” for America’s Vietnam dead, and even a “tragic anti-war picture.”

The movie has its champions in the United States as well, of course, including the highly esteemed director Robert Altman. Unintimidated by the virulence of the “antiwar” group’s attack, the New York Film Critics’ Circle boldly gave The Deer Hunter its award as the best picture of 1978, and for the year’s Academy Awards the picture is at the top of the listing, with nine nominations, as against eight for Jane Fonda’s Coming Home. With all the buffoonery associated with Academy Awards, it is bizarre to think that the Oscar ceremony, which saw Jane Fonda receive an earlier award in Vietcong black pajamas, and Vanessa Redgrave recently launch a hysterical tirade against “Zionist hoodlums,” may yet serve as a possible bellwether of changing American attitudes toward the whole Vietnam experience, and perhaps even a sign of the beginning of the post-post-Vietnam period. Then again, the vote might be decided by the unaccustomed criterion of artistic quality, which would leave political interpretations moot.

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It would not be the first time a historic shift had thrown to the fore a curious standard-bearer. Director Michael Cimino has, in fact, done much to play into the hands of his adversaries. A persistent character trait seems to be a kind of mythomanie, a need to affirm that fictional accounts he relates are grounded in events, preferably events which in some way he himself has experienced. In an interview in the New York Times he claimed he had “joined the army about the time of the Tet offensive” of 1968 and was “assigned as a medic to a Green Beret unit.” None of this seems to be true. He was in and out of the army (Reserve) years before Tet, and the Pentagon says his service record bears no trace of his ever having had any connection with the Green Berets. Cimino is evasive about his personal life; if some statements he has made imply his spiritual home is Brooklyn, his real home seems to be an affluent suburb, and he was educated in private schools and at Yale.

Questioned by European reporters at the Berlin Festival, Cimino said The Deer Hunter had “no political message.” It was “just a story about people.” When asked if there was any significance to his having made the heroes of his film Americans of Russian descent, he said no, he had just used what he knew; he “grew up with a Russian family.” If true, it was an odd Russian family. In The Deer Hunter‘s original scenario (author: Harvard graduate Deric Washburn), the film’s characters are specifically identified as Ukrainian, and some Ukrainian details remain in the film (“Lemko Hall”). But at some point in the work’s artistic development—perhaps under the influence of Tolstoy, perhaps through the metaphor of Russian roulette which dominates the film—the characters became largely Russified. The family name of the hero, Mike, is “Vronsky,” the name of Anna’s lover in Anna Karenina. Cimino still refers to his creations sometimes as Ukrainians, sometimes as Russians.

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The Deer Hunter announces itself very early as an ambitious movie. We are in the steel country of Western Pennsylvania. The opening sequence takes place amid the roar and flames of a steel mill. Their shift over and asbestos suits removed, five young workers leave the mill, engage in horseplay, and drive off to a local tavern run by a friend and fellow “Russian,” where they drink, and sing boisterously out of tune. The leading characters are Mike (Robert de Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken), Steven (John Savage), and Stan (the late John Cazale). Cimino has said, quite accurately, that his film is about “male bonding,” and the males bond quite a bit. Steven’s mother comes to get him because it is time for his marriage, and the movie’s following sequence gives us a Russian wedding in voluminous detail, with the Russian Orthodox ritual, and Russian dancing at the reception afterward. It is in these scenes that the film’s heroic aspirations become unmistakable, as the wedding ritual and festive Russian dancing are shot with a slowness of pacing that in the context of the American commercial cinema is nothing if not audacious

After the wedding reception, the friends carouse and raise hell, in their proletarian way, but there is a serious moment. We have learned that three of the friends are bound for the army and Vietnam, and Nick, grave, says, “I love this country,” and he makes Mike promise to bring his body back “if anything should happen to me over there.” The day after the marriage, the friends, leaving the world of women behind, go deer hunting in the nearby Alleghenies. They bond some more. Stan, perhaps coincidentally the only one of the group to be a philanderer, and who is not bound for Vietnam, shows himself to be a clown and an appalling failure at deer hunting. Mike, identified as a “total-control freak,” is far and away the best hunter. As Mike’s figure is silhouetted against the mountainous skyline we hear an all-male chorus singing the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church. The whole hunt is given the aspect of a purifying ritual. Mike kills his deer with one shot. We see him again, alone against the mountains, as the Russian liturgical singing rises to a tremendous crescendo—just before a “slam” cut to Vietnam.

We are now almost halfway into a three-hour movie. At this point we have a film that recommends itself by its scope and seriousness. Its canvas is large. It has a monumental, Eisensteinian quality to it, a grandeur of shooting and montage. It concentrates on the life of blue-collar workers, but this is a life unspiced by crime or juicy sex or a disco beat—not a favorite subject of Hollywood. The film so far is also quite clearly about masculinity, an attempt to establish some kind of male ideal. It is awash with sublimated homosexuality, possibly unrecognized by its authors, but enough to have French critics class it without hesitation as homophile. Finally, it expresses a kind of elemental nationalism, a love of one’s native place. There is a hint or two that intellectually the film may be half-baked, the product of creative talents living beyond their mental means, but it is an immensely serious effort. It does not draw back (nor will it ever draw back) from ambitious effects.

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Vietnam; tropical vegetation; the sounds of war. In the opening shots of this part of the film we see a Vietnamese in Communist uniform coldly shoot and kill an attractive young Vietnamese peasant woman and her toddler. Hidden in nearby reeds, Mike, now a Green Beret, witnesses the scene, and shortly thereafter avenges these deaths by burning the Communist to death with a flame-thrower. In a coincidence of war, Mike’s two hometown friends, Nick and Steven, attached to a unit of the regular infantry, arrive on the scene by helicopter. There is an abrupt military reversal and all three friends are taken prisoner together. Their Vietcong captors, who are portrayed as relentlessly vicious, treat their prisoners with great cruelty. They put them in cages, with rats, and the cages are sometimes almost submerged in water with the captives barely able to breathe. Above all the Vietcong torment their prisoners by forcing them to play Russian roulette, betting gleefully on the outcome, on the life or death of the American prisoners. There are extended scenes of great tension, with Mike, Nick, and Steven in turn pointing the pistol at their own temples, faces working. Mike, predictably, is the toughest, and by a feat of sang froid and daring succeeds in freeing himself and his friends, although the three are split up in the escape and each goes his separate way. This is the end of the film’s “combat” section.

But once the motif of Russian roulette is introduced, it takes over the plot entirely. Shortly afterward, while recuperating from a wound at an Army hospital, Nick is wandering the back streets of Saigon. Fleeing in revulsion the room of a Vietnamese prostitute, he encounters a worldly Frenchman (“A man who say no to champagne, say no to life”). The Frenchman leads him to a clandestine gambling casino the size of a provincial American sports arena, with grandstands, where Vietnamese are feverishly and very noisily betting on the outcome of matches of—Russian roulette. Sitting in the grandstand, unseen by Nick, is Mike. (Despite extensive questioning I have been unable to find anyone who, directly or indirectly, has ever heard of such a gambling institution in Vietnam, or indeed anywhere else. Nor have I been able to uncover any record or tale of Vietcong or North Vietnamese soldiers inflicting Russian-roulette torment on prisoners. Cimino, who has never been to Vietnam, says he was “told” at least part of the story by an unidentified informant, although at other moments he has admitted that his film is “not realistic”)

In The Deer Hunter, in any event, Nick is strongly attracted to this Russian roulette—so strongly attracted, in fact, that he deserts from the army and takes up a career as an active participant in the game. Russian roulette apparently attracts Mike too, if only as a spectator and bettor, but oddly he never succeeds in making contact with his old friend. Here the story sweeps ahead. We see Mike, lavishly ornamented with both military decorations and sergeant’s stripes, returning on home leave to Pennsylvania. He looks up Nick’s old girl friend, Linda (Meryl Streep). She pleads, “Can’t we comfort each other?” He comforts her without much enthusiasm. He also visits in the hospital the third of the three friends who went to Vietnam, Steven, who has lost an arm and both legs. Astonishingly, Steven has, stuffed into a drawer by his hospital bed, thousands and thousands of dollars which have been arriving from an unknown source. Mike senses that they have been sent by Nick who, although the chance of death is one in six at each go-around, has been playing Russian roulette all these years (it is now 1975 and Saigon is about to fall), beating the rather imposing odds and sending the proceeds to his crippled buddy.

Another “slam” cut. We are on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Panic. The evacuation is on. Most people seem anxious to leave, yet Green Beret Sergeant Vronsky flies not out, but in, carrying a clothing bag over his shoulder. We see him in civilian clothes in the streets of Saigon, where he finds the same decadent, champagne-loving Frenchman we have met before, getting into his convertible to flee. By pressing thousands of dollars upon this Frenchman and others, Mike finds his way by boat along the river to a sports arena where a crowd of monied Vietnamese, impassioned and noisy as ever, remarkably oblivious to the approach of Communist military units, is engaging in its favorite pastime, betting on Russian roulette. The star contestant is Nick, haggard, near-catatonic, his arm covered with heroin tracks. Mike has come to his rescue, but Nick doesn’t recognize him. To shock him into recognition, Mike takes a seat in the pit of the gambling hall as Nick’s opponent in a match. The two white men are cheered on by a crowd of rabid Vietnamese. “Is this what you want?” shouts Mike, placing the revolver to his head. “I love you!” he cries, and pulls the trigger. Click. He lives. It is now Nick’s turn. His face works. The light of something remembered comes into his eyes just before he pulls the trigger of his revolver. But there is an explosion and he falls dead. Mike rushes to him, clutching him in his arms and sobbing, “I love you!” Cut to Nick’s funeral at the Russian Orthodox church back in Pennsylvania. Mike has kept his promise and brought Nick back to the land he loved. After the funeral, in the film’s closing scene, the five surviving friends gather, plus Nick’s old girl friend and the wife of the crippled Steven, and, out of tune but much moved, sing “God Bless America.”

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The whole second half of The Deer Hunter has little claim to realism. One wonders how many men, tortured by being forced to play Russian roulette in captivity, would develop a taste for it and, neurotic or not, engage in it voluntarily once free. In addition, one is asked to believe that: playing Russian roulette nightly, or even weekly, a man could survive for years; an army sergeant would have the political clout to fly into the U.S. Embassy in Saigon at the peak of the evacuation; large-scale gambling on Russian roulette would continue with Saigon in full collapse; the sergeant could get his friend’s body out during the same frantic evacuation in order to be buried in Pennsylvania. The list could be extended. (I am reminded of a film-maker in Real Life, a recent movie by Albert Brooks, who, seeking his way out of a plotting dilemma, cheerfully suggests to himself “Start real, end fake! What are they going to do, send me to movie jail?”)

And what is one to think of the elephantine symbol of Russian roulette that, once having made its appearance, so devours the plot of The Deer Hunter, and for which so much naturalistic plausibility is sacrificed? It is clearly intended to serve as a symbol and perhaps parable of war. But just how rich is this symbol? How much light does it shed? In Russian roulette, as in war, one can get killed, and one can not get killed. Russian roulette has an aspect of bravado, as does war. So far, so good. Now Russian roulette is usually engaged in voluntarily. Is war voluntary? This depends on whether we are speaking of individuals or of states, and in either case the answer is not clear-cut. Wars vary, as do individuals. Russian roulette has no useful social purpose, is pursued for “sport.” Does war have a useful purpose? Once again, there are varying interpretations of varying wars. More to the point, then, did the Vietnam war have a useful social purpose? What does Michael Cimino think? My own feeling is that Cimino is not really much concerned with the rights and wrongs of why we were in Vietnam, and to draw a conclusion on this point from his symbolism would be squeezing more out of it than it contains. But the main reason this symbol is so frustrating is that war, after all, is aggression directed against others. Russian roulette is directed against the self.

But Russian roulette is bad, at least. Is war bad? Those who believe, as many do, that The Deer Hunter is a “peace” movie must base their case on a conviction that Cimino, with his Russian roulette or however, has at the very least shown us that war is terrible. My view is that nobody who adulates—as Cimino obviously does—the courage and strength and military vertu of our Green Beret, our “total-control freak,” our “deer hunter,” can think wars are anything like all bad (any more than Sir Thomas Mallory could have thought the fighting in Le Morte d’Arthur was all bad, or, indeed, bad at all). I have no doubt whatsoever that whether we were right or wrong to be in Vietnam, Michael Cimino wanted us to win there, as he wants us to win everywhere.

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The Deer Hunter, then, is imbued with a kind of primary patriotism, even a florid patriotism. For Cimino, the root, the home base, of this nationalist ardor is in America’s working classes, for whom America is not yet something to be taken for granted. (When the psychologically disturbed Nick is questioned in a hospital by a doctor as to whether his is a Russian name, he says, “No. It’s an American name.”) If the movie makes an unequivocal statement about Vietnam, it is that the war was fought by these people; when the price of being an American had to be paid, they were the ones who paid it. The film is very admiring of what it holds to be working-class strength and vitality, at least that of white Americans of “ethnic” stock. Even early in the film, and before I knew anything of Cimino personally, I suspected it was made by a person of affluent background who was something of a “proletarian groupie.” I now find Cimino once told a reporter: “Those guys were so alive. When I was fifteen I spent three weeks driving all over Brooklyn with a guy who was following his girl friend. He was convinced she was cheating on him, and he had a gun, and if she was, he was going to kill her. There was such passion and intensity about their lives. When the rich kids got together, the most we ever did was cross against a red light.” He is clearly also a military groupie, a Green Beret groupie, and something of a xenophobe. The “Frenchman” in the movie is a caricature, and except for the woman and child who get killed immediately, all Vietnamese of all political persuasions are shown in a decidedly unattractive light.

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To judge by the surprisingly strong positive reaction to The Deer Hunter, the ardent patriotism it expresses is not so dead a commodity in today’s America as some might have thought. But as for Cimino himself, one may be permitted to speculate how deeply his own feelings run on this matter—whether, like the grimy children at the Beach Street Industrial School, he “means every word.” I confess I have my suspicions. I find his flavor, indeed, somewhat reminiscent of those leading lights of the French entertainment world who in 1939 wrapped themselves so ostentatiously in the tricolore, only to rally instantly to the Nazi banner when France collapsed in 1940. It turned out that, more than France, what they loved most was force, power, le côté de la crosse. In Cimino’s case, on an even deeper level in his film than its patriotism is its “male bonding.” Consistent, the director is now embarked on his next project, The Johnson County War, which begins, not with a Russian wedding, but with a “traditional” post-graduation orgy at Harvard in 1871 (Cimino says it is based on “research”). After the orgy, Kris Kristofferson leaves behind him Harvard, city softness, and women, and heads for the pure air of Montana and the land of men.