He is touched vaguely by desire for the girl that more than one of them left behind, but does not act decisively. Then, finally home from Vietnam, he is surrounded by a silence we can never quite penetrate. He survives the prison camp and helps the others. The De Niro character is the one who somehow finds the strength to keep going and to keep Savage and Walken going. It is a brilliant symbol because, in the context of this story, it makes any ideological statement about the war superfluous. The game of Russian roulette becomes the organizing symbol of the film: Anything you can believe about the game, about its deliberately random violence, about how it touches the sanity of men forced to play it, will apply to the war as a whole. At the film's center comes one of the most horrifying sequences ever created in fiction, as the three are taken prisoner and forced to play Russian roulette while their captors gamble on who will, or will not, blow out his brains. Then Vietnam occupies the screen, suddenly, with a wall of noise, and the second movement of the film is about the experiences that three of the friends ( Robert De Niro, John Savage and Christopher Walken) have there.

There is some Hemingwayesque talk about what it means to shoot deer: We are still at a point where shooting something is supposed to mean something. The party goes on long enough for everyone to get drunk who is ever going to, and then the newlyweds drive off and the rest of the friends go up into the mountains to shoot some deer. The opening movement is lingered over it's like the wedding celebration in ' The Godfather,' but celebrated by hard-working people who have come to eat, dance and drink a lot and wish luck to the newlyweds and to say good-by to the three young men who have enlisted in the Army. It's important not simply that we come to know the characters, but that we feel absorbed into their lives that the wedding rituals and rhythms feel like more than just ethnic details. The movie takes its time with these opening scenes, with the steel mill and the saloon and especially with the wedding and the party in the American Legion Hall.

Where was the deer hunter filmed