Editing The Deer Hunter (section)

==Analysis==

===Controversy over Russian roulette===
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| caption1          = Robert De Niro pulls the trigger in the game of Russian roulette that takes place in the Viet Cong prison scene.
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One of the most talked-about sequences in the film, the Viet Cong's use of Russian roulette with [[Prisoner of war|POWs]] was criticized as being contrived and unrealistic because there were no documented cases of Russian roulette in the Vietnam War.<ref name=Biskind/><ref name=Dirks>Dirks, Tim. [http://www.filmsite.org/deer.html "''The Deer Hunter'' (1978)"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100723184108/http://www.filmsite.org/deer.html |date=July 23, 2010 }}. Greatest Films. Retrieved May 26, 2010.</ref><ref name=70s>Auster, Albert; Quart, Leonard (2002). "The seventies". ''American film and society since 1945''. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 120–1. {{ISBN|978-0-275-96742-0}}.</ref> [[Associated Press]] reporter [[Peter Arnett]], who won a [[Pulitzer Prize]] for his coverage of the war, wrote in the ''[[Los Angeles Times]]'', "In its 20 years of war, there was not a single recorded case of Russian roulette&nbsp;... The central metaphor of the movie is simply a bloody lie."<ref name=Biskind/>

Cimino countered that his film was not political, polemical, literally accurate, nor posturing for any particular point of view.<ref name=Dirks/> Nevertheless, he also claimed that he had news clippings from [[Singapore]] that confirmed that Russian roulette was used during the war, without specifying which article.<ref name=Realizing/>

====Critics' response====
In his review, [[Roger Ebert]] of the ''[[Chicago Sun-Times]]'' defended the artistic license of Russian roulette, arguing, "It is the organizing symbol of the film. Anything you can believe about the game, about its deliberately random violence, about how it touches the sanity of men forced to play it, will apply to the war as a whole. It is a brilliant symbol because, in the context of this story, it makes any ideological statement about the war superfluous."<ref name=Ebert/>

Film critic and biographer [[David Thomson (film critic)|David Thomson]] also agreed that the film works despite the controversy. "There were complaints that the North Vietnamese had not employed Russian roulette. It was said that the scenes in Saigon were fanciful or imagined. It was also suggested that De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage were too old to have enlisted for Vietnam (Savage, the youngest of the three, was thirty). Three decades later [written in 2008], 'imagination' seems to have stilled those worries&nbsp;... and ''The Deer Hunter'' is one of the great American films."<ref>Thomson, David (October 14, 2008). ''"Have You Seen&nbsp;... ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films''. New York, NY: Random House. p. 209. {{ISBN|978-0-307-26461-9}}.</ref>

In her review, [[Pauline Kael]] of ''[[The New Yorker]]'' wrote, "The Vietcong [''sic''] are treated in the standard inscrutable-evil Oriental style of the Japanese in the Second World War movies&nbsp;... The impression a viewer gets is that if we did some bad things there we did them ruthlessly but impersonally; the Vietcong were cruel and sadistic."<ref name=Biskind/>

In his ''[[Vanity Fair (magazine)|Vanity Fair]]'' article "The Vietnam Oscars", [[Peter Biskind]] wrote that the political agenda of ''The Deer Hunter'' was something of a mystery. "It may have been more a by-product of Hollywood myopia, the demands of the war-film genre, garden-variety American parochialism, and simple ignorance than it was the pre-meditated right-wing road map it seemed to many."<ref name=Biskind/>

====Cast and crew response====
According to Christopher Walken, the historical context was not paramount. "In the making of it, I don't remember anyone ever mentioning Vietnam!" De Niro added to this sentiment. "Whether [the film's vision of the war] actually happened or not, it's something you could imagine very easily happening. Maybe it did. I don't know. All's fair in love and war." Producer Spikings, while proud of the film, regrets the way the Vietnamese are portrayed. "I don't think any of us meant it to be exploitive," Spikings said. "But I think we were&nbsp;... ignorant. I can't think of a better word for it. I didn't realize how badly we'd behaved to the Vietnamese people&nbsp;..."<ref name=Biskind/>

Producer Deeley, on the other hand, was quick to defend Cimino's comments on the nature and motives of the film. "''The Deer Hunter'' wasn't really 'about' Vietnam. It was something very different. It wasn't about drugs or the collapse of the morale of the soldiers. It was about how individuals respond to pressure: different men reacting quite differently. The film was about three steel workers in extraordinary circumstances. ''[[Apocalypse Now]]'' is surreal. ''The Deer Hunter'' is a parable&nbsp;... Men who fight and lose an unworthy war, face some obvious and unpalatable choices. They can blame their leaders... or they can blame themselves. Self-blame has been a great burden for many war veterans. So how does a soldier come to terms with his defeat and yet still retain his self-respect? One way is to present the conquering enemy as so inhuman, and the battle between the good guys (us) and the bad guys (them) so uneven, as to render defeat irrelevant. Inhumanity was the theme of ''The Deer Hunter<nowiki>'</nowiki>s'' portrayal of the North Vietnamese prison guards forcing American POWs to play Russian roulette. The audience's sympathy with prisoners who (quite understandably) cracked thus completes the chain. Accordingly, some veterans who suffered in that war found the Russian roulette a valid allegory."<ref name=Deeley-198>Deeley, p. 198</ref>

===Director Cimino's autobiographical intent===
Cimino frequently referred to ''The Deer Hunter'' as a "personal" and "autobiographical" film, although subsequent investigation by journalists like Tom Buckley of ''[[Harper's Magazine]]'' revealed inaccuracies in Cimino's accounts and reported background.<ref name=Deeley-197/>

===Male friendship ===
''[[American Film Institute|AFI]]''{{'}}s Movie Club says, "The film portrays male friendship in an atypical way for the time," and asks, "How does the friendship of the characters played by Robert De Niro, John Savage, Christopher Walken and John Cazale evolve throughout the film?"<ref name="afi/MC/dH"/>

===Coda of "God Bless America"===
The final scene in which all the main characters gather and sing "[[God Bless America]]" became a subject of heated debate among critics when the film was released. It raised the question of whether this conclusion was meant ironically or not—"as a critique of patriotism or a paean to it".<ref name=Biskind/> Cimino later spoke of his intentions for the scene:

<blockquote>The ending is really, not meant to be so much a statement of [[patriotism]], but a statement of communion. When people are in trouble, as they are when they're very troubled and sick inside, spiritually very sick, they need, sometimes to do something together. In this case it's make a sound. And they sing that song because it's a song that every American child knows by heart, because you're taught it in school. Everybody knows the words of "God Bless America", and so it's a communal sound, and they begin to sing the one song they all know from [[Primary school|grade school]] on. And you never forget those words as long as you live. And so they sing... the one song they happen to know happens to be "God Bless America", and it reunites them as a family. It becomes a family communion. Instead of a [[Last Supper]], it becomes a first breakfast, if you will, of a new family. It is breakfast that they're eating. It's not the Last Supper, it's the first breakfast.<ref>{{cite web |title=Michael Cimino: I'm probably not so different than Visconti or Ford (2007) |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjV5U7W8X6E |website=[[YouTube]] |access-date=August 1, 2023 |date=August 18, 2022 |archive-date=August 2, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230802141555/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjV5U7W8X6E |url-status=live }}</ref></blockquote>