Capital Celluloid 2014 - Day 215: Mon Aug 4

The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 7.40pm


This multi-Oscar winning movie is on an extended run at BFI Southbank. Details here.

Time Out review:
This is probably one of the few great films of the Seventies. It's the tale of three Pennsylvanian steelworkers, their life at work, at play (deer-hunting), at war (as volunteers in Vietnam). Running against the grain of liberal guilt and substituting Fordian patriotism, it proposes De Niro as a Ulyssean hero tested to the limit by war. Moral imperatives replace historical analysis, social rituals become religious sacraments, and the sado-masochism of the central (male) love affair is icing on a Nietzschean cake. Ideally, though, it should prove as gruelling a test of its audience's moral and political conscience as it seems to have been for its makers.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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