The Deer Hunter - Legacy

Legacy

The Deer Hunter was one of the first, and most controversial, major theatrical films to be critical of the American involvement in Vietnam following 1975 when the war officially ended. While the film opened the same year as Hal Ashby's Coming Home, Sidney Furie's The Boys in Company C, and Ted Post's Go Tell the Spartans, it was the first film about Vietnam to reach a wide audience and critical acclaim, culminating in the winning of the Oscar for Best Picture. Other films released in the late 1970s and 1980s that illustrated the 'hellish', futile conditions of bloody Vietnam War combat included:

• Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979)
• Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986)
• Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987)
• John Irvin's Hamburger Hill (1987)
• Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
• Brian De Palma's Casualties of War (1989)
• Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump (1994)

David Thomson wrote in an article titled "The Deer Hunter: Story of a scene" that the film changed the way war-time battles had been portrayed on film: "The terror and the blast of firepower changed the war film, even if it only used a revolver. More or less before the late 1970s, the movies had lived by a Second World War code in which battle scenes might be fierce but always rigorously controlled. The Deer Hunter unleashed a new, raw dynamic in combat and action, paving the way for Platoon, Saving Private Ryan and Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima films."

The deaths of approximately twenty-five people who died playing Russian roulette were reported as having been influenced by scenes in the movie.