Sexual Roulette

Three Russian-American friends in Clairton, Pennsylvania—Mike, Steven, and Nick—work in a steel mill and hunt deer with co-workers Stan and Axel, and bartender friend John. Mike, Steven, and Nick have enlisted for the Vietnam War. Steven is marrying Angela, pregnant by another man. The stoic Mike and amiable Nick are close friends and roommates; Nick dates Linda, with whom Mike is secretly infatuated. With Mike’s approval, Nick allows Linda to stay in their house while they are away to escape her abusive alcoholic father. After catching the bouquet at Steven and Angela's wedding at a veterans hall, Linda accepts Nick's spontaneous marriage proposal. At the bar, Mike, Steven, and Nick meet a traumatized Green Beret, who curtly dismisses their attempt to ask about Vietnam. Later, after a drunken run through the neighborhood, Nick implores Mike to promise never to leave him stranded in Vietnam. The next day, the group goes on a final hunting trip where Mike kills a deer with "one shot," a code by which he proudly lives. The scene cuts to Vietnam, where Mike, now a Green Beret, coincidentally crosses paths with Nick and Steven, who land in a village during an air assault mission. Early assault momentum meets a counterattack and the scene cuts away. Imprisoned by the Viet Cong in a cage along a river, the three are forced to participate in Russian roulette while the jailers wager. Firing his round into the ceiling, Steven is forced into a cage with rats and the dead bodies of previous victims. During Mike and Nick's turn to play, Mike convinces the captors to increase the stakes by loading three bullets into the revolver rather than one. When the next two chambers luckily fall on empty, Mike and Nick suddenly get the drop on the captors, killing them. Although Nick is wounded in the leg, they rescue Steven and escape. The trio floats down the river on a felled tree trunk, but Nick and Steven quickly grow weak from their wounds. They are found by an American helicopter, which Nick boards. Steven falls back into the river while trying to hold onto the helicopter skids, and Mike drops down to help him. Steven breaks both legs in the fall, Mike carries him until they meet up with a South Vietnamese Army convoy. In Saigon, Nick is treated at a U.S. military hospital. When released, Nick wanders into a gambling den where wagers are betting on Russian roulette. French businessman Julien forces him to come inside. Upset, Nick interrupts the game, pulling the trigger on a player and himself then assaulting the bouncer. Mike, who happens to be a spectator, is unsuccessful in reaching Nick, who hurriedly is taken away by Julien, who becomes Nick's bankroller for future games. Returning home, Mike remains traumatized and avoids Linda's welcome-home party with friends, opting to stay in a hotel instead. Seeing Linda the next day, he learns that Nick has deserted and Angela has slipped into near-catatonia following her child's birth and Steven's return. On a hunting trip with his friends, Mike loses interest in shooting a deer and returns to the cabin, finding Stan cavalierly threatening Axel with a pistol. Mike takes the pistol, inserts a single round, and triggers an empty chamber at Stan's head. Finding consolation in their mutual grief over Nick’s disappearance, Mike and Linda begin a sexual relationship. Mike visits Steven at a veterans' hospital, finding that both his legs and one arm have been amputated and he is refusing to go home. Steven shows Mike that he has been regularly receiving large sums of cash from Saigon. Realizing that Nick is the source of these payments, Mike checks Steven out of the hospital so he can return to Angela. Mike returns to Saigon, now in chaos shortly before its fall, to find Nick. He locates and persuades Julien to take him to another gambling den where a drug-addled Nick has become a high-stakes pawn in Russian roulette and fails to recognize Mike. Mike attempts to bring Nick back to reason, but Nick remains unresponsive, spitting in Mike's face. Resorting to entering in a game with Nick, Mike tries to connect with Nick by describing their hunting trips; Nick recalls Mike's "one shot" mantra about the deer and smiles before pulling the trigger, killing himself. Mike, Steven, friends, and loved ones attend Nick's funeral. As they convene at the bar for breakfast, John begins to sing "God Bless America" and all join in. ^ George Morris, "Ready, Aim... Click", Texas Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 3 (March 1979), page 142: "The film attempts to portray the effect of the Vietnam war on three Russian American steelworkers from a small town in Pennsylvania who volunteer for the war." ^ Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, "Restaging the War: 'The Deer Hunter' and the Primal Scene of Violence" (PDF at Academia.edu), Cinema Journal, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Winter, 2005), p. 103: "It is interesting to contrast Nguyen's narrative of failed assimilation with The Deer Hunter's consolidation of white ethnics (Russian or Ukrainian Americans) into the American body politic through their participation in the Vietnam War." ^ Steven Biel, "The Deer Hunter Debate", Bright Lights Film Journal (ISSN 0147-4049), July 7, 2016: "The first sixty-eight minutes of the three-hour film establish their friendships within Clairton's traditional, patriotic Russian Orthodox community. (The characters' ethnicity isn't actually specified in the screenplay. Viewers have variously identified them as Russian, Slovak, Carpatho-Russian, Ukrainian, Rusyn, Polish, and Belarusian. Pittsburgh native Andy Warhol, who saw a preview of the film in New York in late November 1978, wrote in his diary that the movie's setting was 'where all my cousins are from' and 'was really Czechoslovakian.')" Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).