MOVIES

...The Deer Hunter begins perhaps a decade ago in a grimy Eastern factory town (actually a composite of eight Ohio River Valley cities) where we are introduced to a group of steel mill buddies, paragons of macho camaraderie, whose conversation is of the "Am I right...

...Also, the xenophobic tone of the film, the paintings of the evil Orientals as the prime villains of the war, is sure to raise some hackles, though the point to remember is that The Deer Hunter is effective because it is primarily an artist's and not a historian's or a Marxist theoretician's vision of the hell of Vietnam...

...They couldn't deny their own reactions...

...He can rescue Steven from the hospital, but rescuing Nick from himself against the chaotic backdrop of the fall of Saigon proves to be something even his strengths are unequal to...

...mously successful Grease, broke the logjam by offering to help promote the film after seeing it at a private screening...

...One of Universal's major objections, the harsh, Vietnam-related subject matter notwithstanding, was The Deer Hunter's three hour and three minute length...

...The Deer Hunter's first hour is set in that grimy town and the surrounding mountains as we see the gang drink and carouse, hunt deer, attend the wedding of Steven (John Savage), and prepare for the Army induction and likely assignment to Vietnam of Michael, Steven, and Nick, played by the sleepy-eyed, surprisingly forceful Christopher Walken...

...Steven, physically shattered, hides from his wife in a VA hospital...

...And the more shocking and bloody things get, as the game unfolds with the awful, crystal clarity of true nightmare, the more impossible it is to pull away from the screen...

...For devotees of the dreadful only...

...When executives at Universal first saw The Deer Hunter early last year, they didn't know what to make of it...

...Nick, mentally shattered, ends up living and reliving the Russian roulette experience for money in the back streets of Saigon...

...Lord of the Rings— those who are not Tolkien fanatics will justifiably feel they can't tell the players without a scorecard, but Ralph Bakshi succeeds in creating an involving mood of adventure and fantasy better than survivors of his earlier, X-rated efforts would have thought possible...

...The subject, the violence, the length...

...Everything about The Deer Hunter up to this point — its scope, its expressive photography, the care Cimino has obviously taken with his material — says this film aspires to epic status...

...California Suite — a thoroughly professional piece of entertainment, Neil Simon-pure and simple and hugely enjoyable...

...They always acknowledged that there was something there...

...The final two hours of The Deer Hunter are so dramatically compulsive, the film holds its audience in such a relentless grip, that not until well after the conclusion do its problems and inconsistencies really register...

...With one brutal cut the film moves to Vietnam, to the middle of a confusing, bloody assault on a rural village...

...Then, with terrible, hallucinatory abruptness, The Deer Hunter's ambiance and direction completely , change...

...Too much of the plot, especially the doings in Saigon, depends on melodramatic contrivances, on chance meetings, convenient reassignments to duty, and the like...

...Hits and Misses Moment by Moment — John Travolta and Lily Tomlin team up in what turns out to be the most godawful romantic match since Francis the Talking Mule Joins the WACs...

...Another sudden cut and we are in a Viet Cong prison where American captives, including Michael, Nick, and Steven, are forced to play Russian roulette with each other as satanically gleeful V.C...

...A disciplined, indefatigable deer hunter, he has a mystical attachment to the ideal of the hunt, to getting a deer with just one shot, and to an obscure code of honor that boils down, at one point, to not lending a chronically forgetful friend his spare pair of hunting boots...

...bet on whose brains will get blown out first The Russian roulette scene is the core of The Deer Hunter, a dev-astatingly effective piece of shock footage...

...Unable to make a decision, Universal simply sat on the film until Allan Carr, the unpredictable coproducer of the enorKenneth Turan regularly reviews films for The Progressive...

...Partially because of the brilliance with which the scene is put together, acted, and filmed, partially because the abrupt cuts have disoriented the audience in a way that exactly parallels the disorientation of the Americans, the action is horribly shocking but absolutely riveting...

...Trying to figure out what Cimino is trying to do * becomes the ever-insistent problem...

...They were concerned about everything," says thirty-five-year-old director Michael Cimino, whose only previous credit was Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, starring Clint Eastwood...

...Cimino, however, was adamant about not cutting a frame, and Carr backed him up...

...Only the goateed Michael, suitably underplayed by Robert De Niro, stands a bit apart...

...K.T...

...Unless Francis Ford Coppola's endlessly awaited Apocalypse Now turns out to be a work of total genius, no one may come even this close again...

...The only thing still missing, unfor-tunately, is substance...

...Obsessed to the total exclusion of all else, even the love of Nick's old fiancee, by a feeling of responsibility toward his comrades, Michael tries to reassemble the whole...

...variety...

...After only a one-week trial run in New York and Los Angeles, it was named the best picture of the year by the New York Film Critics, and Las Vegas odds-makers promptly labeled it the six-to-five favorite to win the best-picture Oscar as well...

...For the film's first hour, however, the impression is unavoidable that perhaps both these great minds made a mistake...

...It is precisely here that one is grateful for The Deer Hunter's first hour, because without that elongated beginning the film would not be nearly as effective in pointing out how incomprehensible the sadistic reality of Vietnam is to these people, how sadly hopeless any attempt at making them understand would be...

...But to a large measure in this country we've lost confidence in our intuition...

...To make things worse, a number of > unfortunate lapses into clunky cliche — a surly Green Beret appearing out of nowhere at Steven's wedding, a mist-laden, excessively Wagnerian hunting scene — tend to stand out because of this general lack of pace...

...when, if ever, will he drop the other shoe...

...Because of the self-reliance of De Niro's Michael, the three manage to escape, but they are separated and only gradually does the film tell us where they are...

...Faults and all it is the closest anyone has yet come to conveying the searing, horrendous implications for both Americans and Vietnamese of our involvement there...

...Yet it is a film riddled with crosscurrents and contradictions, a major one being that it might never have been released if it were not for a marshmallow called Grease...

...While Michael seems to be the only one of the three to survive intact, this is not quite the case, for what he has been through has changed him in deep though intangible ways...

...He returns to the mill town but there is a distance now, a formidable gap, between him and those who stayed behind...

...As yet the audience has been given no hint as to what the film's aims are, where all this casual meandering might be leading...

...Right...

...At times erratic but always compelling, overly melodramatic yet absolutely believable, The Deer Hunter goes into general release this month and is certain to be regarded as one of the most grueling, forceful war films ever made...