The Deer Hunter opens in a steel mill and ends at a kitchen table, and between the two it photographs almost everything except the war. Michael Cimino fills the first hour with a wedding, a bar and a mountain — the ordinary surfaces of a Pennsylvania town — so that when the violence finally arrives it lands on people we already know. Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage play three friends who leave for Vietnam whole and come back in pieces.

It is a war film with no battle in it. The fighting happens off to the side; what Cimino keeps in frame is the before and the after, the faces and the rooms. That patience is the whole method. By the time the shooting starts, we are no longer watching soldiers. We are watching Michael, Nick and Steven.

The wedding before the war

The wedding is the film’s real establishing shot. Reds and golds, an Orthodox church, beer and a band, a sequence most directors would have cut in half. Cimino refuses to. He lets the camera stay until the room feels lived-in, until the friendships have texture — and until a few drops of red wine on a white dress read as a warning nobody in the frame can see.

One sound

When Vietnam arrives, it arrives without context: no maps, no politics, no speeches. A cage half-submerged in a river, a wooden table, a revolver passed from hand to hand. The Russian-roulette scenes are the most famous in the film and the most argued over, and they work less as fact than as image — the war reduced to a single sound, the click of an empty chamber and the crack of a loaded one. Walken’s face does the rest.

The Deer Hunter (1978), directed by Michael Cimino — The Deer Hunter (1978)

The third act is the quietest war film ever made about coming home. Michael returns to a town that has not changed and finds that he has. On the mountain, rifle raised over a stag, he lets the animal go. The gesture is the whole picture: a hunter who can no longer take the shot.

The faces and the craft

The performances are why it endures. De Niro holds the center with stillness; Walken won his Oscar for a slow disappearance behind his own eyes; Meryl Streep gives Linda more inner life than the script supplies. John Cazale — gravely ill during the shoot, and gone before the film opened — plays Stan with a frightened bravado the camera seems to mourn in advance. John Savage’s Steven comes back the least whole of all.

Vilmos Zsigmond shot it in long lenses and natural light: the mill in copper, the mountains in cold blue. Stanley Myers’ “Cavatina,” a single guitar, carries the grief the dialogue refuses to state. The film is long and slow on purpose, and its critics have a case — the Russian roulette has no documented basis in the war, and the politics are conspicuously missing. Cimino was never after the record. He was after what the war did to a face, a marriage, a hunt.

Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter (1978) — The Deer Hunter (1978)

Why it lasts

It won five Academy Awards, among them Best Picture and Best Director, and it closes on a handful of survivors singing “God Bless America” at that same kitchen table — not ironic, not triumphant, simply what people do when there is nothing left to say. Vincent Canby, in The New York Times, found its view limited but its feeling for blue-collar lives genuine; the New York Daily News called it bravely innovative; Variety predicted, correctly, that Cimino was a director to watch closely. The watching ended badly, with Heaven’s Gate. This film remains.

Our verdict

A war film without a battle, an epic built from surfaces — the dress, the table, the gun, the song. It asks for three hours and earns them. Few American films of its era have aged with less apology.