An iconic war film starring Robert De Niro is now available to watch on Amazon Prime, and fans have called it “one of the greatest films ever made”. The Deer Hunter, released in 1978, follows a trio of Slavic-American steelworkers (De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage) who go off to fight in the Vietnam War. The lives of the three men from a small town in Pennsylvania are impacted and disrupted by the horrors of the conflict, something that is explored in depth as they re-enter civilian life.
The film gets its name from a scene in which Mike (De Niro) kills a deer with a single shot while on a hunting trip with his friends. Mike’s most famous line in the film is: “You have to think about the one shot. One shot is what it’s all about. A deer has to be taken with one shot. I try to tell people that but they don’t listen.”
It was nominated for nine Academy Awards in 1979, and won five: Best Picture, Best Director (for Michael Cimino), Best Supporting Actor (for Walken), Best Sound, and Best Film Editing.
It was also Meryl Streep’s first Academy Award nomination (for Best Supporting Actress).
The Deer Hunter has been included on numerous lists of the best films ever made, including being named the 53rd-greatest American film of all time by the American Film Institute in 2007.
It was also selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1996 for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
Viewers appear to agree with the accolades, with one person on IMDB calling it “one of the greatest films ever made”.
Another described De Niro as “sensational”, adding: “By the end I thought of them as brothers and I loved them. I actually loved them. That in itself is a sort of film miracle.”
A third added: “Cimino’s great directing and the cast’s awesome acting provide for a touching and honest drama about the friendship of a group of young men that is destroyed by the Vietnam war.”
The Deer Hunter is partly based on an unproduced screenplay called The Man Who Came to Play by Louis A. Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker about Las Vegas and Russian roulette.
Cimino and Deric Washburn rewrote the script after it was bought by producer Michael Deeley. The two men took some of the original ideas of the screenplay and placed them in the Vietnam War.