[The Deer Hunter is] a sick and manipulative film—remarkable only for its adolescent perceptions and wild selfindulgence—that is impressing many people as the truth, the real version of what the war was like in Vietnam. Cimino has done what no one else has succeeded in doing: he has rejected the immense suffering of the Vietnamese in the South, of the Vietnamese in the North, of the Americans who fought there, in favor of a story that suits his own longings and his own fantasies about men. Do not enrich him further by going to see The Deer Hunter.

In our desperation to explain our defeat in Vietnam, and to be comfortable with it, many people need a film like The Deer Hunter which shows the Americans in Vietnam as gallant, good, noble fellows pitted against the despicable, giggling and inhuman Asian monsters who do not, of...