A Christopher Walken jag from recent things, and I guess a continuation of the working class vibe from Blue Collar. Third or more time around. I don't understand this movie; the American war in Việt Nam seems mostly ancillary to this exploration of the lives of the lethal boys from Clairton, Pennsylvania, USA. Their hometown antics after work at the steel mill are pretty generic. A core theme is just wishing you'd stayed home. It may be that Michael Cimino tried to pack too much in even while letting things sprawl to three hours. It may also be that this movie was the first to successfully set out how the war should be treated in popular American culture, with many themes (going back for a buddy, mutual solace with a mate's partner, losing limbs, etc.) later receiving separate feature-length treatments. In contrast MASH (about the Korean War but released in 1970) and Coming Home (also 1978) seem more limited.
The theme music (Cavatina) is iconic: composed by Stanley Myers and performed by John Williams from Melbourne. #193 in the IMDB top-250. Heavily Oscared: best picture, Walken for support, Cimino for direction, sound and editing. Robert De Niro got a nom but not a gong, as did Meryl Streep who was young once. I felt John Cazale could have had more than two modes. George Dzundza. The river Kwai in Thailand stands in for one in Việt Nam.
Roger Ebert: four stars. "It is one of the most emotionally shattering films ever made." Russian Roulette "is a brilliant symbol because, in the context of this story, it makes any ideological statement about the war superfluous." — and yet it does make an ideological statement about the war. Vincent Canby: more thoughtful than usual. Apropos De Niro's "one shot": "As codes go this one is not great, but it is his own." — clearly these are the days before Lose Yourself. The wedding "occupies 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 than life-ordering rules of the present."
IMDB trivia: was Russian Roulette prevalent during the war? Protests at the Berlin festival in 1979. Protests by the Los Angeles chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Unapologetically ahistoric, ignorantly racist, not really about the war or Việt Nam.