Il Cacciatore records controversies legendary film Michael Cimino - Released in Italy in 1979, the Cacciatore, a fluvial and dramatic tale of the effects of the Vietnam War on a group of friends, was a controversial success awarded with 5 Oscars.

On December 8, 1978, the first film about Vietnam was released in America, which quickly became one of the most loved, controversial and controversial war classics in the history of American cinema: it was Michael Cimino's The Hunter, the director's second film after A 20 gauge for the specialist , which related the friendship between a group of workers of Russian origin in a Pennsylvania steel mill, on the eve of the departure of three of them, Mike (Robert de Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage), for Hell of Vietnam, where Mike tries in vain to protect his brotherly friend Nick (Walken) when they end up prisoners of sadistic Vietcong. The highlight of the film is in the Russian roulette game that the two friends are forced to play by their jailers. The trauma will mark Nick forever, while Steven will lose the use of his legs. Among the many facts and legends that accompany this controversial masterpiece, we want to mention the main ones.

Il Cacciatore records controversies legendary film

5 Oscars and the latest interpretation of a great actor

The hunter lasts more than 3 hours and is the most successful film of the Italian-American director who passed away in 2016. Nominated for 9 Oscars, he won 5: best film, best direction, best supporting actor to the magnificent Christopher Walken, best sound and best editing. For De Niro, former Oscar for The Godfather - part II, it was the third nomination, while Meryl Streep, who plays the emotional Linda, loved by both Mike and Nick, had the first candidature of his long career for the role. It was unfortunately the last film of his partner, the great actor John Cazale, unforgettable Fredo del Padrino, who had terminal cancer and shot his scenes first, even though he could never see the finished film, since he died a little after the end of filming, only 42 years old. Initially the studio tried to fire him because of his illness, but Streep and Cimino threatened to abandon the set and De Niro paid insurance for the actor out of his own pocket.

Political controversies

Despite the success of the public, in a highly ideological historical period such as the seventies, numerous controversies broke out around Il Cacciatore, essentially for the portrait of the Vietcong and for Russian roulette, of which there were no cases during the Vietnam War. The critic Peter Biskind spoke of Cimino as "our first native fascist director, our Leni Riefenstahl", while Roger Ebert, as usual, understood what everyone else had misunderstood: "Russian roulette is the programmatic symbol of the film: everything that can be believed about the game, its deliberately causal violence, how it affects the mental health of men forced to play it, applies to war in general. It is a brilliant symbol because, in the context of this story, it makes any ideological statement about war superfluous. " Unfortunately, when The Hunter was announced as a participant in the Berlin festival in 1979, the Soviet delegation was outraged by what they considered unwarranted insults to the Vietcong and other representatives of the communist bloc states expressed their solidarity with "the heroic Vietnamese people", abandoning the festival, despite the cancellation of Il Cacciatore from the program. In Italy Cimino's film was released in April 1979, and even here he was judged reactionary.

The initial prologue

As everyone will remember, Il Cacciatore - which ends with a funeral - begins with a very long 51-minute prologue, focused on the wedding between Steven and Angela and on the wedding celebrations, with a long dance scene, which is remembered above all " Can't Take My Eyes Off You ”, the famous 1967 hit by Frankie Valli and The 4 Seasons. The wedding was filmed in the historic Russian Orthodox church of St. Theodosious in the suburb of Tremont in Cleveland, and it took five days to shoot it. The priest who officiated the wedding was a real priest, Father Stephen Kopestonsky. A large number of extras were hired for the reception and dance scene, who drank real alcohol. The extras of Russian origin (as were the protagonists of the film in fiction) were asked to bring boxes that would be used for wedding gifts. When they finished shooting, the scenographers realized that the boxes were not, as they thought, empty, but full of real gifts, with porcelain and silverware services. Before shooting this spectacular overture, Cimino had already exceeded the budget given to him, and he was just halfway through the film.

The scenes of the Russian roulette

These sequences were shot with rats and mosquitoes, while the three protagonists were tied up in bamboo cages on the Kwai river in Thailand. If the local fauna helped the realism of the setting, it was more difficult to find an actor - the organizer of the deadly game - who was able to look really bad: the first one could not slap De Niro, as the script required. Eventually a Thai was chosen who could not stand the Americans. It was Robert De Niro who suggested that Walken was taken by surprise by one of the jailers, causing a reaction of genuine surprise on the part of the actor. Despite the logistics and the complexity of the scenes, they were shot faster and smoothly. When Mike got angry with Cazale's character Stanley when he got home and point-blank shoots him with a gun that had a single bullet in the barrel, according to Cimino, De Niro had requested that there was some inside the drum a real one. Cazale agreed but before each scene he obsessively checked the weapon to make sure that the real bullet was not the next one. Finally, the heartbreaking scene of the last meeting between Mike and Nick, perhaps the highest moment of the film, was left by Cimino to the improvisation of the actors.