Having first cut his teeth in Hollywood as a writer on the Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force, Michael Cimino won praise and patronage from Clint Eastwood who later starred in his directorial debut, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Parlaying this success into the chance to write, direct and produce his second film, The Deer Hunter, Cimino played the Hollywood system like a seasoned professional and very nearly became one of the great success stories of American movies. Unfortunately his career is now more typically viewed as a cautionary tale about Hollywood's ability to corrupt creative vision and crush those who would call its sultry hills home.

Before becoming a speed bump on the road to limelight celebrity, however, Cimino's second film so divided audiences that The Deer Hunter has since been seen by some as a filmmaking masterwork. For others it is a propagandistic hate film taking gross liberties with the historical record at the expense of accurately representing the Vietnam experience. These differences are clearly traceable from the movie's release but it's also necessary to insist on The Deer Hunter being a watershed demonstration of Cimino's creative vision at the apex of his career.

Two years later his talents would beach themselves as he bankrupted United Artists, the production studio and distributor for his third film, a western called Heaven's Gate. After nearly a decade of winning friends in high places and producing his road movie, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and his historical epic, The Deer Hunter, it was Heaven's Gate that ended his influence and credibility with a serious budget overrun and director's cut running nearly four hours long. Suggestion of such divergence from the practice of for-profit filmmaking was present in The Deer Hunter although its focus on an extremely straightforward story more handily reined in Cimino's excessive impulses.

Budgeted at nearly $15 million, The Deer Hunter is about three Pennsylvania steel mill workers drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. Michael (Robert De Niro), Steven (John Savage) and Nick (Christopher Walken) are friends looking forward to their patriotic duty. Leaving behind their friends Stan (John Cazale), John (George Dzundza), Axel (Chuck Aspegren) and Nick's girlfriend Linda (Meryl Streep), Steven gets married so his wedding serves as a send-off party for the three friends leaving for Asia.

In country all three men experience their share of terrors including capture as prisoners of war and forced participation in games of Russian roulette. Eventually they escape from their imprisonment and manage to survive the war although Steve leaves it a paraplegic and Nick as a broken man indifferent to living.

Returning home a wizened warrior Michael begins assimilating into civilian life and falls in love with Linda despite his conflicting emotions of betrayal and attraction in light of her previous relationship with Nick. After Steven's return home as a handicapped man in a wheelchair, Michael tries to find Nick who has gone native and disappeared.

Later uncovering his whereabouts by following a money trail, Michael tries bringing Nick home from his participation in an on-going Russian roulette game. Betting his life on the spin of a barrel Michael proves luckier than Nick who shoots himself dead thereby leaving the original group of friends to try and start over in the aftermath of Vietnam.

Running at just over three hours long The Deer Hunter is an emotionally difficult and complex movie that maintains interest due to consistently strong performances and its series of tour de force set pieces. Among them are the wedding that occupies fully the first quarter of the film, the POW Russian roulette game, various intimate domestic scenes and the final Russian roulette game between Michael and Nick. Each sequence is punctuated by interesting period details, strong production design elements and the play of emotional reactions with dramatically necessary events.

These sequences and their fundamental distance from any historical record are also what break the dramatic tension and potentially disrupt the movie with fantastical moments. Noting this at the time of the film's release, and in subsequent interviews on the subject, Cimino has stated it was not his intention to produce a documentary or any kind of objective lesson about either the Vietnam War or life in a Pennsylvania steel town. Instead his intention was to create a dramatic situation for telling a story about friendship and the connections between people who love each other in a context that may, or may not, collide with real events.

To this end Cimino's supporters have long upheld his ivory tower vision and the thrust of his creative project. Such a disconnection between creative endeavors and the socio-cultural circumstances they necessarily interact with, however, is exactly what spurns on those who condemn The Deer Hunter as a hoax.

Of course the Russian roulette sequences peppering the film with bursts of immediacy for being literally about life and death are false to the Vietnam experience, POW or otherwise. Critics often site this fictional device to eviscerate the film on the grounds it ignores anything but the most effective method for exciting an audience at the expense of other considerations, truth telling among them. In short, the film's critics tell us, Cimino's bravura storytelling skills are used to heighten key moments in the narrative heedless of the way the resulting overall film would be cast as a textbook on the times, the use of Russian roulette included.

Aside from being an interpretation of the film's reception rather than of the film itself, these critics justify their position without remarking on the movie's dramatic arc. It's a bit like pointing out what a film isn't instead of discussing what it is and still The Deer Hunter is like a hammer compelling audience reactions rather than being a feather inviting them on a flight of whimsy.

It's true the movie manipulates emotions as much as it elicits them through on screen action. It's also true the movie ignores any of the complex circumstances surrounding the Vietnam War to make it a streamlined journey about individual men. Being herded this way through a series of emotional hoops makes some audiences turn away even as others consider it a sign of skilled moviemaking technique.

Having grossed nearly $27 million at the US box office The Deer Hunter was both a critical and commercial success even with this divide between supporters and detractors. Now a legendary title among movie aficionados, as much from the continued careers of the film's actors, except John Cazale who died soon after shooting the picture, as from the authoritative position of the film's representation of the Vietnam War, it is also one of the more interesting stories in Oscar history.

To push for Academy Award consideration the moviemakers set up advance screenings for industry insiders at the end of 1978, just in time for Academy Awards qualification. Carefully massaging the Hollywood imagination to equate The Deer Hunter with the most important work of the year, the picture caught on with Academy voters without the wider public ever having seen a frame. When its was later announced as the winner of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Best Film Editing and Best Sound Oscar statuettes, The Deer Hunter was not yet a commercial film but a hotly anticipated release. Naturally its Best Picture win cemented a certain level of audience response and the film further clarified certain theories about the life of a movie.

First of all it became a normal practices for prestige films to be released very late in the calendar year to coincide with the Christmas time box office rush and to qualify for an Oscar run. The Deer Hunter also mainstreamed its focus on a socially unpleasant topic, in this case Vietnam, as the grist for popular entertainment. Plus the film affirmed the continued place of epic length movies in excess of three hours length that could still prove profitable if marketed properly to encourage the widest possible audience.

To the idea of mainstreaming Vietnam into popular culture it's important to recognize the relatively small number of mainstream titles that focused on the war before The Deer Hunter. Aside from John Wayne's The Green Berets in 1968, Hollywood didn't focus on Vietnam until the end of the 1970s aside from a few exploitation movies or pictures produced outside the mainstream industry. Then in 1978 The Deer Hunter was nominated for an Academy Award alongside another notable Vietnam movie, Coming Home, just as Francis Ford Coppola was busily preparing his own much delayed Vietnam movie, Apocalypse Now.

Though the Jane Fonda/John Voigt drama was more concerned with the war's after effects than the war itself, Coming Home was another powerful representation of the Vietnam experience that appealed to audiences and a new moral climate in America. Together these two films served notice that Vietnam was part of the popular arts including references to military veterans, Asian refugees and various economic consequences then wrestling for a place in the day-to-day lives of people everywhere.

With hindsight it's clear that The Deer Hunter is a complicated movie. Multiple reviewers, scholars and critics have sited its possible subtext about homosocial, or even homosexual desire, as demonstrated by Michael and Nick's relationship and their difficult assimilation into post-War life. There are also writers who argue on behalf of the film for its sympathetic view of working class life even while some can't abide by the film's demonization of Asians through its harrowing war sequences and overwrought hero narrative.

I don't dispute the validity of these positions. Nor do I singly support any one reaction to The Deer Hunter because it's a movie that elicits differing responses each time I see it.

Over several screenings I've come to simultaneously believe the movie is a laughable domestic melodrama that forces some of filmdom's hottest then-new actors to enact one of Cimino's fantasies about society and the mire of war. On other occasions I've been moved to tears from the bluntness of watching the movie's characters struggle for survival that I think has been the experience of an entire swath of the baby boom generation. On still other occasions I've been offended by the film's implicit racism, slipshod use of history and the unnecessary length through which I'm forced to watch a movie that's at most only elliptically about hunting deer.

Like the National Film Preservation Board I think The Deer Hunter is an important film that deserves our attention and should be viewed with its original aspect ration on film or digital media and not on videotape, whenever possible. I also believe it's a symptom of its moment acting with a mirror-like capacity to view American society as a place filled with invention, heroism, cowardice, purposeful ignorance and sometimes blind celebration.

Not for nothing does the film end with its surviving cast members singing "God Bless America." Sounding altogether filled with false hope and like the beacon of a new day, The Deer Hunter is an American classic.