Fleapit revisited:The Deer Hunter.

"From the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam. God bless America, my home sweet home. God bless America, my home sweet home" - God Bless America, Irving Berlin.

It seems only right that Irving Berlin's God Bless America should feature, in a most bittersweet way, in Michael Cimino's 1978 film The Deer Hunter (shown on BBC1 and iPlayer recently). Because, as with Apocalypse Now - the film it is most often compared to, it is a film about the American experience. The backdrop may be Vietnam and, specifically, the Vietnam War but, again like Apocalypse Now, Vietnamese people do not feature heavily, are not fully realised characters, and exist purely as dressing to tell the story of America in the sixties and seventies.

An America, as now, in some kind of existential crisis. The Deer Hunter is set between 1968 and 1970, roughly ten years before it was made, in Clairton on the outskirts of Western Pennsylvania and, of course, Vietnam. Clairton is textbook rust belt Americana. Steel mills pump out smoke all day and all night, juggernauts and white Cadillacs with fins cruise its streets, and men play pool, drink beer (always Rolling Rock, in Apocalypse Now it was Budweiser, this is surely product placement), eat KFC, wear plaid shirts and trucker caps, and live in a world where macho banter always looks likely to cross over into actual violence.

When redemption isn't found in beer, it is found in religion (specifically the Russian Orthodox Church) and, for the first hour of the film, most of the action takes places in and around a large church, in the steel mill, in the bar, and in the beautiful hills and lakes where the men go to shoot deer. These men are Mike Vronsky (Robert De Niro), Nikanor 'Nick' Chevotarevich (Christopher Walken), Steven Pushkov (John Savage), Stanley (John Cazale), John (George Dzundza), and Axel (Chuck Aspegren).

Mike, Nick, and Steven have been conscripted to fight in Vietnam. So once Steve has married Angela (Rutanya Alda), and Linda (Meryl Streep) has accepted a proposal from Nick (even though Mike clearly has his own interest in Linda) after catching the bouquet at the wedding, it's time to drink more beer, shoot some more deer, and head off to South East Asia. As with Vietnamese people, the women in The Deer Hunter only exist as blank pages for men to write their own scripts on. This is not a film about women. This is a film about men. American men.

After an hour or so in Pennsylvania, Vietnam could hardly look more different. It's sunnier and more verdant but, other than that, it's a land of low flying helicopters, pigs, dead bodies, and burning villages. The horrors of war are writ large when we see a Vietnamese woman clutching a baby machine gunned to death and an American soldier nonchalantly lob a grenade into an underground shelter, terminating the lives of an entire family, perhaps an entire village.

Contrast rural Vietnam with a Saigon of bars, strip clubs, gambling dens, and streets thronged with masses of people and cars blasting their horns. But Saigon is not, initially, where Mike, Nick, and Steven find themselves. They find themselves, instead, imprisoned, alongside other POWs, in a cage on a muddy river. 

Captured by a particularly sadistic brigade of Viet-Cong soldiers who force their American prisoners to play, infamously, Russian roulette while their jailers place bets on the outcome. When an outrageous attempt to escape their fate actually works their hellish experience of war is far from over. But is their experience of 'peace', on returning to Pennsylvania, really that much better?

The post-war world is one of difficulty reintegrating, PTSD, and trying to engage with people, former friends and partners, who simply have no idea what they've been through - having been drip fed a steady diet of misinformation about the war for years. Worse still, all the problems that already plagued these now veteran's lives are still there.

But have now been thrown into even sharper relief. There are disturbing scenes of prostitutes with crying children in their rooms, claustrophobic moments on jungle rivers where terror and death could be lurking anywhere, there are multiple plays of Stanley Myers' Cavatina and drunken singalongs of Frankie Valli's Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You, and there is, of course, the terribly tense and uncomfortable images of soldiers being forced to play Russian roulette (perhaps what the film is best remembered for). But, most of all, there is an overwhelming sadness in seeing young men's lives destroyed before they ever really had a chance to begin. Even when the bullet doesn't pierce your skull, it still pierces your mind.