It's introduced when the three friends, prisoners of war of the North Vietnamese, are forced by their captors to

Most particular and most savage is the film's use of Russian roulette as a metaphor for war's waste. Of the collapse of Saigon and the American withdrawal from Southeast Asia. Is the brutality of the war and its brutalizing effects, scenes that haunt 'The Deer Hunter' and give point to the film even as it slips into the wildest sort of melodrama, which Mr. Cimino has described his treatment of the three friends' war experiences as surreal, which is another way of saying that a lot of recent history is ellipsized or shaped to fit the needs of the film. Most of the film's first hour and sets out in rich detail what I take to be one of the movie's principal concerns-what happens to Americans when their rituals have become only quaint reminders of the past rather

Steve is the conventional one, whose marriage (a Russian Orthodox ceremony, followed by a huge, hysterical reception) occupies Nick goes along with Mike, sometimes suspecting that Mike is eccentric, but respecting his eccentricities. As codes go this one is not great, but it is his own. More than one shot apparently isn't fair. It is Mike, a man who makes a big thing about hunting, about bringing down a deer with one shot. To the extent that any one of them has an interior life, Mike is the one who calls the tune for his friends. The three friends, all of Russian extraction, are Mike (Robert DeNiro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steve (John Savage). Grown up in the television age and matured in the decade of assassinations and disbelief. 'The Deer Hunter,' which opens today at the Coronet, is an update on the national dream, long after World War II when America's self-confidence peaked, after the Marshall Plan, after Korea, dealing with people who've It's about three young men who haveīeen raised together in a Pennsylvania steel town, work together in its mill, drink, bowl and raise hell together, and then, for no better reason than that the war is there, they go off to fight in Vietnam. I don't mean to make 'The Deer Hunter' sound like 'War and Peace' or even 'Gone With the Wind.' Its view is limited and its narrative at times sketchy. Instead, he's tried to create a film that is nothing less than an appraisal of American life in the second half of the 20th century. Cimino has only directed one other movie (the 1974 box-office hit, 'Thunderbolt and Lightfoot'), which makes his present achievement even more impressive. Though he has written a number of screenplays, Mr. Michael's Cimino's 'The Deer Hunter' is a big, awkward, crazily ambitious, sometimes breathtaking motion picture that comes as close to being a popular epic as any movie about this country since 'The Godfather.'

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