Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
moment, one was enough. The attitude is the same among the were characterized by a determination on the part of the spon- union members as well; they appear to have a positive attitude ...
...He's not the gruff, blustery cowboy that after having returned home a hero, Michael learns that Nick, John Wayne turned into in the fifties, but more the Gary who had been reported AWOL, is still in Saigon hiding out...
...Yet this is exactly what is done not have the funds to support deficits or pay for upgrading...
...react...
...Yes, the Viet Cong and North Vietused to crop up in movies about French Indochina back in the namese did commit atrocities during the war, and the fact that days when no American had any idea where that was-it was they are continuing to do so now, when we have stopped, just some Oriental never-never land-and all the actors pro- makes it easy to pretend that their behavior was the only real nounced Saigon "Say-gone...
...professional manager...
...Nonetheless, Cimino maintains this level of contri- Michael grabs a machine gun away from his V.C...
...be bitter...
...In Redding, California, the five-county' Central Labor Providing housing for those in need of such assistance, Council attributed its seven-year record of success in manag- according to Henry Schechter, Director of the AFL-CIO's ing its project t9 "strict adherence to the policies and proce- Department of Urban Affaris, "is part of the traditional `good dures established for the operation of our projects, and by and welfare' activities of unions...
...Private developers participate in the federal subsidy prolong the Vietnam war was that we must not seek programs in order to generate profits under a tax shelter, at no "peace at any price...
...Swimming alone against the tide of humanity in these Steven is to be married, after which Michael and Nick will go scenes, Michael makes a very heroic figure, and a very ludioff on one last deer hunt before reporting for duty...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...labor...
...For in the false consensus of "end of ideolprofessoriat (Brandeis, in his case), with some years before that, in fact, Partisan ogy," established as the ascendant what mixed feelings we can readily imag- had been in the process of becoming a ideology of philistine and intellectual ine...
...or body...
...ing of two or three decades, later...
...The only time we see a North object is to drain the glass without spilling any wine, Cimino Vietnamese regular, for instance, he is mass-murdering dedoes a close-up of one, unnoticed drop staining the bride's fenseless villagers...
...In short, his last years, though they in American cultural history...
...Later in Saigon there is a begins killing them, the audience with which I saw the film Frenchman Nick meets who is sitting in a sports car drinking cheered wildly...
...kept watch over in the course of the Moscow trials and believers in unsullied first principles...
...Before he ever goes to bility which the movie itself doesn't own up to...
...Their captors don't seem to want any infortime...
...their commitment to housing projects often does not seem The Deer Hunter is a movie which is ready to indulge in every strong enough to carry them through...
...characters come across as having the capacity for love and Each time one of them is made to pull the trigger, the V.C...
...and Nick (Christoper Walken)-a wedding is to be held...
...The tacit suggestion in this sequence of events is that of the rest of us took from them a decade ago...
...During the war a lot of us who were tormentors and escape, back in Saigon Nick discovers a opposed gave up thinking of such people as human...
...to believe that it would have cared enough about the fate of two Steven is marrying, we learn, because he has to, and the of them to help Michael go back and look for Nick...
...Then a bit later a Green Beret whom nobody knows troops they allow Steven, unconscious from his wounds, to be comes in and drinks sullenly, silently, at the end of the bar...
...and those projects built by non-profit organizations as a community service or philanthropic gesture...
...This quality he shows as a Vietnam, the beautiful, clear-eyed boys from Ohio who took hunter is what gets him through Vietnam...
...It's a movie which asks Americans to accept at last a That contrast makes the union-sponsored projects seem all dishonorable peace-a peace which simply returns, after all the more remarkable...
...bet great loyalty to one another...
...In Cooper version...
...That was the high period of SAUL MALOFF suppose that the whole would have richly the journal, the late '30s and '40s, the WHEN PHILIP RAHV died in 1973 at the fulfilled the promise of its excellent achievement that secures its lasting place age of 65 he had long since come to parts...
...With all their pain and inadequacies, though, these mation or confession from them but just some grisly sport...
...and worked away at the book on The break virtually defined the intel- doned or dishonored together with all Dostoevsky that had been gathering in lectual atmosphere of the period: the his mind for a lifetime and which, great Party and the Stalinist anti-aesthetics of `Essays on Politics and Literature 1932pity, still had some long way to go at his "proletarian literature" on one side of 1972, by Philip Rahv, edited by Arabel J. death, though the fragments separately the barricades...
...When the bride and groom have a special toast whose followed up in other ways, too...
...The only time we see some A.R.V.N...
...The result us...
...This suggestion that the Vietbegins to puff itself up and become melodramatic in certain namese Communists really were the villains of the war is ways...
...2 March 1979: 117...
...This is the kind of characterr that place else in the world...
...We come right nam...
...The council's members live in these subsidized projects, Schechter rightly only complaint is the difficulty they have had over the last five calls them indicative of "the pro bono publico support for years in persuading HUD to authorize them to build 60 more low-income housing which is a traditional policy of organized units...
...At the same time, he points out, the "skills acquired in It is generally accepted that one of the first requirements for managing on-going union activities provide an expertise a successful subsidized housing development is a first-rate which helps make for successful housing sponsorship...
...RAHV & SHEED, UNACCOMMODATING CRITICS Keeping us honest and shape and provide ample reason to on the other...
...A control Vietnam, Michael is already a legendary figure back home freak" is what Michael Herr is describing in his book Disbecause of his skill in stalking a deer and his self-discipline in patches when he talks about the "lurps" on night patrol in always killing it with one shot...
...We must have a peace that was little cost to the public purse, however successful many of the "honorable...
...On the eve of the departure of three friends for Michael is returned to Saigon via the embassy and under Vietnam-Michael (Robert De Niro), Steven (John Savage) military escort to try to find his lost friend...
...the vicissitudes of the student movement purges, the nature of Stalinism was PR, "his" journal, he must have felt, in the late '60s and early '70s with a garishly illuminated for all who would had been usurped, its own uncorrupted shifting mixture of excitement and dis- see...
...torturers and vance throughout the rest of the film...
...Ironically, organizations-fraternities, church groups, coops, and other though, while such claims were specious then, they seem to private social welfare agencies - most often turn into flops, the me important to keep in mind now...
...Although an and women who used to be referred to, without any sarcasm, act of derring-do by Michael permits the three to kill their as "decent Americans...
...One of the boys' own friends themselves...
...Nick's girl (Meryl Streep) has a father who's a Less laughable is the way the movie depicts the Vietnamese hopeless drunk and beats her...
...Derlys Sweet insists, "Not being hampered by a lot of trained personnel, we manage by heart, with a deep personal commitment to the project, and personal involvement in manage- Screen ment is not to be taken lightly...
...is that the major characters are ultimately sucked into the If the Viet Cong are the Indians here, Michael is the cowmaelstrom of fantasy in this film along with minor ones like the boy, the strong, silent, lonely type who is shy with girls but uninvited guest at the wedding and the Frenchman...
...own place: an achievement no less than in the 1930s, a tumultuous time driven by But some vital spark was obviously that of altering the intellectual temper of urgencies, frenzies, wars, dislocations missing...
...But our problem was our behavior...
...Especially in the scenes before and during the audience in just the same way by volunteers desperate for wedding, he restores to these Americans a humanity that many money...
...He is, as one of his to killing as if they had been born to it...
...collected allow us to discern its tendency and the aesthetics of literary Modernism 366 pp...
...the for-profit projects have by and large been much more successful and long-lasting than the not-for-profit I N THE late 1960s and early 70s, one of the things said to projects...
...By then, of course, he The wars won-Modernism having Not that he had fallen silent, or disap- had parted company with Partisan Re- become standard fare in the Literature peared, a fate not unknown to others of view, the divorce following an acrimoni- departments of every agricultural college his generation and kind...
...Manager ceivably see a new era in successful subsidized housing...
...COWBOYS AND VIET CONG Interestingly...
...What It is having the gall to include such hokey material as this we did in Vietnam made American soldiers into people capawhich makes The Deer Hunter effective...
...time Party organ as its principal intellec- tically altered by the veering winds as to issued pronouncements and contributed tual opposition and magnet for other dis- have become unrecognizable or at least occasionally tb other periodicals, notably affected writers and intellectuals when, unacceptable to himself, the last of the The New York Review...
...there was a sense of incon- the times, reordering the definition of scarcely recognizable to a generation gruity, a voice speaking in a void, no culture, changing the terms of discourse which came of age a decade, to say noth- longer attuned to time, place, historical and argument...
...founded a new "little" magazine, journal qualitatively different from the alike and in virtually identical termsthe short-live if not entirely ill-fated one Rahv had co-founded in the '30s Rahv must have felt rather like a general Modern Occasions, which reflected his (with William Phillips and others) fol- deserted by his legions, his banners appolitical and literary biases and provided lowing his split with the Communist propriated by the onetime enemy, his him with a lectern from which he could Party and the reconstitution of that one- causes discarded or forgotten or so drasquarterly instruct the nation and world...
...and as its seem a vestige of a remote historical era, were spent in a kind of exile, were hardly dominant editor and personality Rahv's some figure out of afin de siecle located unfruitful, much less indolent...
...They are the kind of ordinary men feverishly on whether he will blow his brains out...
...For the most part these claims were nothing but projects might be...
...the Russian immigrants in a small steel-mill town in Pennsyl- Embassy from its gates to its roof-top trying to get out, vania...
...obviously, one cannot automatically predict management...
...problem all along...
...version of Marxism (as he saw it) abanmay...
...In fact, since few union requiring strict tenant adherence to the lease...
...they appear to have a positive attitude soring union to make the development succeed...
...It was sickening...
...circumstances...
...In San An- solve the problems and upgrade the housing...
...and in their zeal to be kind of self-delusion to ease the pain of our having lost 50,000 good fellows, they are too permissive both in tenant selection, dead and hundreds of thousands more wounded in either mind tenant eviction and management...
...This is been sacrificed to strategic error the way ours were in Vietwhat makes both parts of the film moving...
...One project in fact declares its success is due to success for any large-scale project, based on such limited its nonprofessional management-Union Park Apartments, in experiments...
...Union Pines man- In each case the sponsoring union had identified the difficulager, Shannon Eichler, calls her project "probably the best in ties, brought in new management, and reacted to problems the nation, with many people unaware that it is a subsidized much more quickly than non-profit organizations generally project...
...Cimino and his three ble of their own atrocities, and no movie which ignores that collaborators on the script simply overwhelm our compunc- fact, as this one does, is really going to redeem either them or tions about Vietnam by not having any themselves...
...A control freak" is own friends says, "a control freak...
...But if the nations's labor unions ever do begin to San Antonio, gives small Christmas gifts to each family, sponsor housing on a grand scale comparable to that in Europe arranges trips to movies and libraries, provides Boys Club and elsewhere-based on the success of every single one of the memberships, offers sewing and crafts lessons, and has instal- twenty union projects thus far in existence-we could conled basketball courts and playground equipment...
...anti-Stalinism, he had joined the great migration of for- reconcilable differences over fundamen- now in the postwar period which ushered merly "alienated" intellectuals into the tal nature, purpose and direction...
...Subsidized housing in this country generally falls into two classes: those projects which are built by private developers in PEACE WITH HONOR order to make a profit...
...If we have to see the Viet champagne and says, when Nick refuses to have some himself, Cong riddled with bullets in order to salve our own wounds, "The man 'oo 'azz lawst 'iz taste for champagne, he 'azz lost we're probably capable of opening them again in reality some 'iz taste for life, monsieur...
...the unspeakable decadence in Saigon has been inspired by the But even before the wedding reception is over, the film inherent evil of the Viet Cong...
...bodice...
...in Michael Cimino's sensational new film, The Deer Hunter...
...Not since the French general staff used an entire much Cimino may romanticize what happens later, in Viet- generation as cannon fodder in the First War have young men nam, he does not do so in these early parts of the film...
...Now is when we shouldn't housing projects quickly being foreclosed by HUD and virtu- be willing to make our peace-the one we still have to make ally lost to the community...
...Without exception, the union projects that we have been through, to the old lies of the past...
...find forebodings as heavy-handed as these-particularly the What The Deer Hunter quickly turns into is a Western in sinister stranger at the feast, the mysterious uninvited guest- which the Vietnamese Communists are the Indians, the vicious you would have to go back to the worst moments in silent savages who have to be mowed down...
...what Robert De Niro played in Taxi Driver, where a returned But the plain truth is that in the madness and disillusionment Viet vet goes back into training, as if he were at boot camp of Vietnam, the sort of qualities that Michael took there again, in order to prepare for a spree of assassination and perished or were perverted just as readily as any other Ameri- murder...
...In the end, dangerous in action...
...a mask of rectitude behind which politicians still harbored Unfortunately, projects started by nonprofit desperate, murderous dreams of military glory...
...When probtoward the projects that have been built, but are not particu- lems develop, the sponsors seem willing to pitch in and do larly anxious to build more, without widespread community whatever is necessary, including committing more money, to encouragement...
...A little tardily, ous separation marked by deep, then ir- and polytechnic institute...
...Cimino gambling house where Russian roulette is played before an rectifies this...
...These organizations normally do with ourselves-at any price...
...The whole enmity between his bride and his mother is obviously going to idea is laughable...
...To invalided back to Saigon on their over-crowded jeep...
...There are exceptions, however...
...However crous one...
...Behind the notion of the deer hunter in this Commonweal: 116 movie is James Fenimore Cooper's deer slayer, who was cans had...
...more-and so, it seems, is the community...
...2 March 1979: 115 The film begins with a very sensitive portrait of life among the final days of the war, as a horde of refugees throng the U.S...
...Several project tonio, Texas, the local AFL-CIO council built a project, Union managers admitted that at the start their developments had Pines, that has been so successful they are anxious to build suffered from poor initial management, due to inexperience...
...At the point when movies...
...yet here again, the union projects seem Whether these successes can be repeated on a larger scale, if to flout the conventional wisdom, since many of them are run more unions were to get involved in housing programs, reby non-professionals who nonetheless do an excellent job of mains to be seen...
...Early in the Vietnam sequences, Michael, Nick (John Cazale) is the kind of "asshole," as Michael himself and Steven are all captured and forced by the Viet Cong to play puts it, who thinks it's impressive to brandish handguns all the Russian roulette...
...Partisan, the ideologies Porter and Andre J. Dvosin, with a Memoir published during his lifetime and here* of anti-Stalinism (Left, Right, Center) by Mary McCarthy, Houghton Mifflin...
...After our military proved that it cared nothing about the away to think of the characters as real people with real prob- fate of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, are we now supposed lems...
...The attitude is the same among the were characterized by a determination on the part of the sponunion members as well...
...The movie's own term, "freak," betrays this possihimself a prototype of the cowboy...
Vol. 106 • March 1979 • No. 4
