Best Picture Winner: 1978

The Deer Hunter (1978)

After making The Godfather Part II (1974) director Francis Ford Coppola started preparations on his epic Vietnam film, Apocalypse Now. The filming was such an ordeal that Apocalypse Now would not be released until 1979, by which time two other releases about the war, Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, had beaten it to the screen. The Deer Hunter took the best picture prize for 1978, so that when Coppola’s film finally made it to theaters audiences had already been cinematically exposed to the physical and emotional brutalities of war.

The Deer Hunter focuses on three friends who work in a steel mill near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Michael (Robert De Niro), Steven (John Savage), and Nick (Christopher Walken). The three are days away from enlisting to fight in Vietnam. Before they leave, Steven gets married and Nick proposes to his girlfriend Linda (Meryl Streep), with whom Michael is also in love. In Vietnam the three find themselves prisoners in the same camp, and are forced, for the amusement of their captors, to participate in challenges of Russian roulette. The three manage to survive the contests, but the ordeal will have life changing consequences for the close-knit trio.

The Deer Hunter spends the first hour or so establishing the characters and their emotional make up. Michael is the serious one, Steven the emotional one, and Nick the one who internalizes everything. There will be a wedding, a deer hunt, and several visits to the local bar. They are regular guys who seem perfectly content. Then they are suddenly prisoners of war. At the camp, it will be Michael who insists the friends keep it together, Steven who openly breaks down, and Nick who remains stoic and silent. After their service, Michael appears to be least affected, Steven can’t bear to face his wife, and Nick has mysteriously vanished. The characters remain consistent with the respective emotions established in the film’s first third. Since we learn what hunting means to Michael and what marriage means to Steven, we comprehend on some level the devastating toll the war has taken on them upon their return. Nick’s fate is even more tragic, as he is so shattered by the experience that he is emotionally lost and totally disconnected.

Because America had been so successful in previous wars, very few war films had dwelt negatively on life subsequent to the battlefield, a notable exception being 1946’s Best Picture victor The Best Years of Our Lives. But now America was in the aftermath of what is considered its first loss, and filmmakers wanted to show the horrors of war. The Deer Hunter spends less than a third of its time on the actual war, because its main focus is on how these three cheerful fellows with bright futures were forever altered by what they experienced. This intention is foreshadowed early in the film when a Green Beret sits at the bar for a drink. The future soldiers want to buy him a drink and shake his hand. He does not want anything to do with them, preferring to be left alone. Thus when Michael returns, he avoids a welcome-home party as he now understands his experience has left him an outsider. No one, except those who shared his ordeal, can possibly understand his feelings. The war has distanced Michael from his friends. It is a sad reality that The Deer Hunter examines unflinchingly.

The Deer Hunter marked a return to the serious side of things for the Academy after awarding the top prize to the feel-good Rocky and humorous Annie Hall. It is a sad but honest look at the ripple effects of battle. The film ends at a wake where the gatherers start singing God Bless America as a reminder that this country had weathered wars before and survived. But this is cold comfort for someone who must bury their loved one. For those personally touched by war, the battle is never truly over.