In these post-cold War days, it's easy to forget just how contentious The Deer Hunter once seemed. The film caused a huge outcry at the Berlin Festival, where the Soviet delegates complained, "The heroic people of Vietnam are insulted, something which is particularly impermissible now at a time when the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is being subjected to barbaric aggression from China and is fighting a just battle for its freedom and its independence." When the festival refused to withdraw the film from its programme, most of the Eastern bloc countries walked out. Back in Britain, the film was pilloried by John Pilger in the New Statesman. He accused Cimino of "sifting the ashes of one of history's most documented atrocities in order to repackage it and resell it as a Hollywood smash that will make them fortunes".

Politics, though, were never uppermost in Cimino's mind. He wanted to show the effect the war had on his protagonists—three small-town, Pennsylvanian steel workers who had the misfortune to be thrust into it. From their perspective, it was a hellish experience. Even so, Michael (De Niro), Steven (Savage) and Nick (Walken) don't question why they've been sent to Vietnam. Late in the film, when the old friends sing "God Bless America", there's no sense of sarcasm or anger.

Certain sequences are macho and simple-minded. Whether seen on the hilltops hunting deer or jumping off a helicopter, De Niro's character sometimes behaves like a blue-collar answer to Nietzsche's Superman. The moment midway through a game of Russian roulette when he turns the gun on his sadistic captors and frees his two friends wouldn't look out of place in a Rambo movie. "A hunter... a friend... a leader... a soldier... a hero... a man," was how the studio publicity described Michael. But De Niro is far too thoughtful an actor to lapse into clichés. His Michael, grounded and pragmatic, is the antithesis of neurotic figures like Travis Bickle. De Niro conveys brilliantly Michael's innate resourcefulness and dignity, as well as his growing anguish at the fate of his two friends. It's only when he goes back to Vietnam to hunt for Nick in the opium and gambling of Saigon that he finally gives vent to his emotions. (Walken's typically febrile turn as the drug-addicted ex-GI playing Russian roulette won him an Oscar.)

De Niro's performance is complemented by Vilmos Zsigmond's rich, dark cinematography. Like many subsequent Cimino films, The Deer Hunter abounds in set-pieces—the wedding party, the hunting trip, the Russian roulette scenes. It's often portentous and self-conscious. Early on, when De Niro looks skyward at the sun and describes it as "a blessing for the hunter sent by the great wolf to his children", you search in vain for a shred of irony. Some of the best scenes are the quietest, like those shared between De Niro and Meryl Streep (as Linda, Nick's girlfriend). Streep only appeared in the film because she wanted to be close to her then boyfriend, John Cazale (Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather Part II), who was dying of bone cancer. The studio, learning of his condition, tried to fire him, but the rest of the cast made it clear they'd quit too if he went.

The Deer Hunter is a boy's own buddy movie which crudely caricatures the Vietnamese, but it transcends these shortcomings. As Pauline Kael wrote: "It has no more moral intelligence than the Clint Eastwood or action pictures yet it's an astonishing piece of work, an uneasy mixture of violent pulp and grandiosity, with an enraptured view of common life." It fully deserved the Best Picture Oscar for 1979 (presented to Cimino by John Wayne—the Duke's final public appearance). Cimino may now seem a spent force (his pipe dream is to adapt André Malraux's epic 1933 novel, Man's Fate) but The Deer Hunter has aged better than almost any other Vietnam War film of the era.

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