Mike, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have anything to prove about his manliness, and while he may not actually empathize with his prey, he nevertheless doesn’t want to be unnecessarily cruel. Stan has something of a gun fetish and a nasty streak a mile wide - the prospect of a gun in Stan’s hands is frightening. And an argument on the day of the hunt between Mike and his weaselly little jerk of a friend, Stan (John Cazale, Fredo in The Godfather) is meant to differentiate the two. Director Michael Cimino obviously wants us to understand Mike’s reverence for the sport: Ecclesiastical choral music underscores one last hunting trip in the foggy mountains before the guys ship out. He’s an acolyte of that particularly American form of religion - hunting. A quiet loner, he possesses a cool calm that will later explode in Vietnam into an almost desperate pragmatism - he will swing from writing off a friend as a goner not worth wasting limited resources on to later putting own life at risk to save that friend. Our view of the events of the film are filtered mainly through the eyes of Mike, one of the most strikingly ambiguous characters I’ve even seen captured on film.
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Apparently much alike on the surface, each will be affected in different ways by the war. Mike (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steve (John Savage), steelworkers in a gray, run-down Pennsylvania town, are ordinary, blue-collar guys whose chief amusements run to drinking and pool. The Deer Hunter is a lyrical, slow-to-unfold story of the devastating effects of a tour in Vietnam on three close friends.