The greatest year in cinema history, according to Michael Cimino: “Filmmaking at its best”
For the longest time, for some unknown reason, I had put off watching The Deer Hunter, although, come to think of it, it was most likely due to the film‘s three-hour runtime.
I knew it had Russian roulette scenes, and Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep, but what I wasn’t prepared for was it ending up being one of the greatest films I’d ever seen, courtesy of the skill and vision of the director, Michael Cimino.
If you haven’t seen it, perhaps due to the length, or perhaps because films about the Vietnam War don’t interest you, then I urge you to change that as soon as humanly possible. The other hurdle that you’ll need to overcome is Cimino’s opening, a wedding scene that stretches out, quite deliberately, to a point where you start to wonder if anything is actually going to happen.
But what he is doing is making sure we know these characters, workers and friends in a steel plant in a blue-collar town, and their families, and the dynamic between them as well as we possibly could before he plunges us without warning into the abject hell of a water-logged Vietnamese prisoner of war camp.
The shock of going from the happiness of two people getting married to seeing one of them torn away, with the husband having to watch his fellow soldiers murdered in front of him, is one that reverberates throughout the rest of the film, along with the psychological effects they suffer once they finally return to their home in the US.
Christopher Walken is frankly incredible in the film, and he rightly won the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ while De Niro was nominated for ‘Best Actor’. The film itself won the Oscar for ‘Best Picture’, and Cimino took home the award for ‘Best Director’, while Streep was also nominated for what was just her second movie. All in all, the film was nominated for nine Academy Awards and six Golden Globes, again winning one for Cimino.
It has to stand as his greatest achievement, although the former director of adverts for companies like Pepsi and Maxwell House coffee made other fine films in his long career, including the film that attempted to follow The Deer Hunter, 1980’s Heaven’s Gate, again starring Walken, this time alongside Kris Kristofferson and John Hurt in an epic Western. The film struggled on release and was wildly over budget, with tales of a difficult production and Cimino’s apparent temper in getting what he envisioned.
Although the film would go on to be seen as one of the best of the 1980s, the director’s career never fully recovered, and he was involved in a string of failed productions, with Oliver Stone describing him as ‘Napoleonic’.
New York-born Cimino was still feted after his death as one of the greatest directors, however, with names like Edgar Wright and William Friedkin paying tribute to him. The man himself was influenced by some of the more legendary figures in the golden age of Hollywood, directors like John Ford, in addition to Japanese master Akira Kurosawa, also speaking about how films like Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and La Strada were major inspirations.
He picked out one year in particular as being his favourite for movies, telling film author George Hickenlooper, “Whether we’ll ever see a year like 1939 again is hard to say. That was the most incredible year in the history of the movies. John Ford made three movies, and Victor Fleming made Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.”
As outlined by Cimino, who passed away ten years ago, 1939 does indeed seem to have been something of a special one for movies, featuring Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Cary Grant in Gunga Din, Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings, among several other hits.
The filmmaker further added, “It was absolutely astonishing. The commitment to excellence in every department is so apparent. Everything, the writing, the casting, the props… It’s professional filmmaking at its best.”
