The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Michael Cimino · a film in English, with some Vietnamese and French · 1978 · the theatrical release, about 183 minutes
Mode
Epic of community and war film in one; the American town, its church and its hunt, broken by a war it never sees whole
Mythos
The frontier hunter and his code of the clean kill; fate made a game; the warrior who cannot re-enter the city, and the double who stays in the underworld
Phase
From a wedding in Clairton to a funeral there, by way of a mountain, a cage on a river and Saigon, ending in 1975 as the city falls
Presentation
Feature film in colour and widescreen, about 183 minutes in its theatrical release; three movements of unequal length, the first by far the longest, joined to the second by a single hard cut
Register
From a drunken, comic reception to the terror of the cage; choral music on a mountain, a Chopin piece at a bar piano, a hymn sung thinly at a breakfast table
Scale
Three friends, one town, one war seen from inside an American nightmare
Governing Proposition
Three friends from a Pennsylvania mill town go from a wedding and a hunt to a war, and one of them does not come back from it. The wager of the film is that a community lives by its rites, that the code of the clean kill its men carry to the mountain is the same code a prison cage turns into a game of chance and death, and that what the war sends home cannot be taken back into the rite, though the rite goes on.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins at the mill. In Clairton, a steel town in Pennsylvania, the open-hearth furnace throws its fire, and a shift ends. Michael, Nick, Steven, Stan, Axel and John come off it together and go to the bar that bears John’s name. Steven is about to be married, and three of them, Michael, Nick and Steven, are going to the war. The town around them is particular before it is anything else: a bowling alley, a supermarket job, a trailer, a bar, an Orthodox church.
Michael Cimino directed it from a screenplay by Deric Washburn, on a story by Cimino, Washburn, Louis Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker, for EMI Films; Universal released it in the United States in December 1978, a qualifying run before a wide release early in 1979. Vilmos Zsigmond photographed it, Peter Zinner edited it, and Stanley Myers wrote the music, whose “Cavatina” John Williams plays on guitar. Robert De Niro is Michael, Christopher Walken Nick, John Savage Steven, John Cazale Stan, in his last film (he died before it was released), Meryl Streep Linda and George Dzundza John. The theatrical release runs about 183 minutes.
The film is in three movements of unequal length. The first, in Clairton, holds the mill, the wedding and a hunt; the second, in Vietnam, a village, a cage on a river and Saigon; the third returns to Clairton and the mountain, then to a hospital, to Saigon in 1975 and to a funeral. The first is by far the longest. The disproportion is the design: before a shot is fired, the film spends its time on what the war will take.
Movement II
The wedding is in the Orthodox cathedral; St Theodosius in Cleveland stands for Clairton’s church. The choir sings, and the crowns are held over Steven and Angela. Angela is pregnant, and the marriage begins under a false sign. The rite is shown at length and without irony: the community of a mill town in its church, its sacrament carried out in full, the men from the furnace in their suits.
The reception fills a hall with the whole town, and the dance holds it together. At the bar a soldier answers every question the men put to him with an obscenity. When the cups of wine are drunk, a red drop falls on the bride’s dress, and she does not see it. Steven’s mother weeps at the dance. Each of these is planted and paid: the soldier is the return before it has happened, and the stain is a sign the camera sees and the rite does not.
The reception is drunken and comic, and it is long. Its length is the film’s first argument. Zsigmond’s camera moves through the crowd as if it belonged there, and Zinner’s cutting holds the dancing and the toasts in long rhythms. Nothing in it hurries toward a plot. What it builds is the town as a body held together by rite: the thing the rest of the film will test, and the thing whose absence the return will make visible.
Movement III
After the wedding the men drive to the mountains to hunt. The drive, and a quarrel over boots, run long. Then Michael is alone above the cloud on the peak, and the deer is taken with one shot, under choral music. His code is in the phrase he lives by, “one shot”: control and the clean kill. He states it as a law of things, “this is this”.
The mountain was filmed in the Cascades of Washington, and it is plainly not Pennsylvania’s. It is less a place near the town than the frontier itself, and Michael on it is the frontier hunter set down in a mill town, Cooper’s Deerslayer behind the title. The hunt is a rite under a code, as the wedding was a rite under a church, and it will come twice. The first time, the deer falls.
Back at the bar, John sits at the piano and plays Chopin, and the men are silent. The community is at rest after its rites, and the film lets the piece play out. Then, with no bridging scene, it cuts to a helicopter over a burning village. There is no training, no unit, no campaign. The war arrives as the town will feel it, as rupture without passage.
Movement IV
Michael, Nick and Steven are taken prisoner. They are held in a cage over a river, with a pit below full of rats, and their captors make them play roulette with a revolver, betting on the outcome, amid slaps and screams. The film holds the scene at a pitch of terror sustained by its length. The Vietnamese here are torturers and gamblers, and the roulette, the film’s central figure, has no documented basis in the war.
The code of the clean kill is turned inside out. On the mountain one shot was control; in the cage a single round in a cylinder is chance. The rite of the hunt becomes a rite of fate, watched and wagered on by others. The three escape down the river, and a helicopter comes. Steven’s fate is staged in fragments, and Nick is parted from the others.
Nick is in Saigon. Its night streets, its brothels and a French gambler lead him to a gambling den where the roulette is played again, and the film shows his descent only in pieces. This middle movement is built as a thriller’s set pieces, capture and escape, rather than in the form that governs the rest, and the war is disclosed as an American’s nightmare, not as a place or a people. Its terror is real, and so is its cost.
Movement V
Michael comes home and cannot go in: there is a party for him, and he does not enter it. The return repeats the opening places, the bar, the house, the mountain, the trailer, with the people missing or changed. Steven is in a hospital. The town is the same place and not the same world, and the film shows it by putting the same rooms on the screen again.
On the second hunt Michael has the deer in his sights, fires over it, and shouts across the valley. The hunter’s change is enacted on the archetype, not stated. Then he goes back to Saigon, in 1975, as the city falls, and finds Nick in a gambling den. Nick’s face recognises Michael and does not, and Nick takes back Michael’s own words, “one shot”. Then the shot.
After the funeral the mourners sit at a breakfast table and sing “God Bless America”, thinly, half in tears. The film ends there, with no victory and no verdict: a sacrament after loss and a song whose tone is left open, elegy, irony or affirmation, or all three. It won five Academy Awards from nine nominations, for Picture, Director, Supporting Actor for Walken, Film Editing and Sound. Forty-eight years on, the question the breakfast table asks is still argued.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test and the part most often attacked resists it. The wedding, which looks like length, is the argument: the crowns, the wine that falls on the bride’s dress unseen, the soldier at the bar who answers every question with an obscenity, the dance at which Steven’s mother weeps. Without the hour in Clairton the cage and the return would have nothing to tear. The first hunt is required by the second, the cage by the Saigon den, the hospital by the funeral. What holds the axis lowest lies inside the movements: the drive to the mountains and the quarrel over boots run long, Saigon’s night streets are atmosphere more than step, and Michael’s return in 1975 rests on a descent of Nick’s shown only in fragments.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a community whose bonds are made in ritual sends its sons to a war it does not understand, and what returns cannot be taken back into the ritual. The men’s code of the clean kill is shown to be the code the cage turns into a game of chance and death. It is shown through image and sound more than statement, and that counts in full: the mill fire, the dance that holds the whole town, the party Michael cannot enter, the hymn sung thinly at the breakfast table. What holds the figure is the war. Vietnam is disclosed as an American’s nightmare, not as a place or a people: the Vietnamese are torturers, gamblers or crowds, and the roulette has no documented basis in the war.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of both kinds. The cathedral wedding, the choir and the crowns held over the couple; Michael alone above the cloud on the peak, the deer taken with one shot under choral music; the cage over the river, slaps and screams and a pit below, held at a pitch of terror the cinema of its decade rarely sustained so long; the escape down the river; the second hunt, the shot fired over the deer and the shout across the valley; Nick’s face in the Saigon den as he knows and does not know Michael. Between them, the guitar of the “Cavatina” and John at the bar piano. Held below the top: the Saigon interludes and parts of the return play level, and some of the height is pressed out by duration.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The myth is built and bears load. The hunter of the American frontier, Cooper’s The Deerslayer behind the title, is placed in a mill town and sent to war: Michael’s code is the frontier ethic of the clean kill, and the film is the testing of that code. The deer is the hinge, killed in the first hunt and spared in the second, so that the change is enacted on the archetype rather than stated. The roulette is fate made a game, a rite of chance against the rites of the church, and the film is framed by sacraments, a wedding and a funeral. The warrior who cannot re-enter the city is as old as the Odyssey, and here the double stays in the underworld. Held below the top where the frontier myth is worn on the surface and the Vietnam myth leans on invention.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the war film, the American epic of community in Ford and Stevens, the veteran’s-return picture after The Best Years of Our Lives, and the family epic of The Godfather. The turns are real: an hour given to a wedding before a shot is fired; a cut from Clairton to Vietnam with no bridge, and no training, unit or campaign on the screen; the war told through three friends and one game; an ending with no victory and no verdict, only a patriotic song at a funeral breakfast, its tone left open. The stake was large: a long, costly film on the war from a director with one previous feature. Held below the gate because the form is the classical epic swollen rather than broken, and the boldest element, the roulette, is a melodramatic device placed where the war’s own facts would have stood.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The disproportion is the instrument: the long, unhurried Clairton hour against the sudden cut to fire, so that the war is felt as the town feels it, as rupture without passage. The return repeats the opening places, the bar, the house, the mountain, the trailer, with the people missing or changed, and the repetition carries the knowledge that home is the same place and not the same world. The hunt comes twice, the roulette twice, the church twice, and the doubling is the film’s argument about what war makes of rite. Held below the top because the middle movement is built as a thriller’s set pieces rather than in the governing form, and Nick’s Saigon story is told by an ellipsis that reads in places as a gap.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Forty-eight years of return are evidence, and the questions stay open: whether “God Bless America” at the breakfast is elegy, irony or affirmation, and how far it is all three; whether this is a war film or a film about the absence of a war it cannot see; how far its portrait of the Vietnamese is a racist failure and how far a deliberate confinement to American terror, which is itself a charge; what binds Michael and Nick, love, rivalry or the code; why Michael spares the deer. The critical record is large and divided, from the quarrels of 1978 and 1979 to readings of class and the industrial town, of masculinity, of the Orthodox community. Held here because part of the return is to the controversy rather than the work, and the Vietnam movement, once seen, yields less than the bookends.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Released in December 1978, into the American cinema of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is real: the film made the war in Vietnam a subject for the large studio epic, not in combat but in what it did to a town at home, and showed that a long film could spend its first hour on ritual and earn its war by it. It is an enlargement of the epic more than a reorganisation of possibility, and the films that followed took its subject more than its form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Coming Home (1978) it opened the cycle of Vietnam films that ran through Apocalypse Now (8.8), made independently and shot first, Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987); it made the damaged returning veteran a central figure of American film; and its roulette passed into the common vocabulary.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-eight years. The form survives whole: the theatrical release is intact, restorations are repair, and the shortened television versions are variants that take nothing from it. Presence has been continuous, in repertory, on television and every home format, in polls and in teaching. It is wide, though less constant than the most circulated films of its decade, and the film’s length and its politics have held its exhibition below its fame. The war of 1968 to 1975 is history in the film, not fashion, though the styling of its town dates it, and the treatment of the Vietnamese weighs on its presence more than on its fabric. Forty-eight years are survival demonstrated, and they are not centuries.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight across the bookends. Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography gives the mill its fire and the mountain its cold light, and moves through the wedding crowd as if it belonged there. Peter Zinner’s cutting holds the reception in long rhythms and breaks it with one cut to war; the sound makes the cage a space of slaps, water and shouting. The ensemble is exact: De Niro’s Michael held in, his feeling legible in the hands; Walken’s Nick, whose face empties across the film; Streep’s Linda in a part the script gives little; Cazale’s Stan, small and vain. The costs fall where the film puts its weight: crude staging of the Vietnamese, loosely joined Saigon scenes, mountains plainly not Pennsylvania’s, Steven’s fate staged in fragments.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the drunken, comic reception, men singing at the bar, and the last roulette in the Saigon den. One law governs both: rite holds men together, and the same rite, emptied, destroys them. The wedding is rite, the hunt is rite under Michael’s code of “one shot”, the roulette is rite emptied of meaning and filled with chance, the funeral and its song are rite after loss. The comedy of the reception and the terror of the cage both obey it, which is why the first hour does not belong to another film. The range runs from a dance to a death. The strain is in the middle: the Vietnam movement obeys a thriller’s law of capture and escape, and the Saigon of the brothels and the French gambler belongs to a looser fable.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what a film of three hours holds. Labour, at the open-hearth furnace and the shift’s end; the family, in a mother’s grief, a pregnant bride and a marriage begun under a false sign; the sacred, in the Orthodox church, its crowns, its funeral and its priest; the ethnic community, in its dance, songs and food; nature, in the mountain and the deer; history and the state, in the draft, the war and the fall of Saigon; friendship and male love; consciousness, in Michael’s code and its breaking. They are integrated: the mill, the church and the mountain are one community’s places, and the war takes from all three. What holds the axis: consciousness is seen from outside, Linda’s and Angela’s inner lives are withheld, the war’s other side is absent, and the state enters as a draft and a flag.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 8.7, then The Archetypal Deep, The Imperishable and The Made at 8.6. Summits of several kinds, cathedral, peak, cage, spared deer and last roulette, recurring across three hours; a frontier myth built into the structure, so that the hunter’s change is enacted on the deer; forty-eight years of continuous presence; and a making that bears weight across the bookends.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2: the drive to the mountains, the Saigon night streets and a return that rests on Nick’s descent shown only in fragments are permitted rather than required, though the wedding is not. Above it, The Unconcealment, The Swerve, Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed at 8.3: a war disclosed as a mood of terror rather than as a place or a people, a classical epic swollen rather than broken, a subject opened more than a form, and a consciousness held from outside.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition, each at 8.3, fall two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: the lowest axis it covers is The Inevitable at 8.2, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. The work is held below the summit by one condition, the Epochal Gate, unmet on three axes, and by its aggregate, 8.4 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Deer Hunter as released in the United States by Universal in December 1978, the theatrical release, about 183 minutes, from the mill to the breakfast table: directed by Michael Cimino for EMI Films, produced by Barry Spikings, Michael Deeley, Michael Cimino and John Peverall, written by Deric Washburn from a story by Cimino, Washburn, Louis Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker, photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, edited by Peter Zinner, with music by Stanley Myers. Shortened television versions are not the work and are not judged; a longer assembly made in the cutting room was never released and is neither judged nor charged. Restorations of the theatrical release bear on The Imperishable only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The film is judged in English; its Vietnamese and French passages are judged as the film presents them. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and a song only by its title. The Saigon sequences in detail and the order of the shorter return scenes are held less surely than the structure and the principal scenes, and no timing within the film is given. Facts that could not be verified, among them the share of the running time before the war, the length of the reception, the song sung at the bar during it and the year the film entered the National Film Registry, are not given.