Well, John Podhoretz says I’m crazy. He writes:

Yes, it is crazy to say The Deer Hunter leans left. It is the most sustained depiction of American heroism in Vietnam, and it is combined with the most powerful evocation of a culturally conservative America ever filmed. Its view of the Vietnam war is deeply confused, but it leaves us in no doubt that the American fighting man was a person of great value, and that America is of great value as well. In 1979, this view was nothing short of revolutionary.

Update: From a reader:

Greetings, Jonah
Not to weigh in on the Deer Hunter, left or right, debate, but your observation that the movie did enrage the hard left is right on point. When the movie premiered, Chicago’s Studs Terkel, a 30’s fellow-traveler whose past has been sanitized in a fashion well recognized by you, wrote a scathing movie review published in Chicago Magazine. Terkel rarely wrote movie reviews. The gist and focal point of his review was that in depicting American POWs as being abused by their Vietnamese captors, the film was profoundly immorally racist. It was clear to me at the time that Terkel knew that the movie powerfully reminded the movie-going public about the torture of American POWs by the Communists, a theme that Terkel perhaps felt had been forgotten in the midst of the common liberal talking point of the ’70s that the Vietnamese had been fighting a war of independence against American imperialism which the US justly lost. At the time it was striking to me that Terkel thought that the scene was so powerful that it had the potential to sustain or even encourage an alternate (conservative) view about the Vietnam War. Ergo eminence gris like himself had to step forward to denounce the film. None of the foregoing detracts from your conclusion the the film is left-leaning.
Regards,
[name withheld]

Update II: From another reader:

Jonah:
With respect to the Deer Hunter I think you had to be there.
Me and a couple friends from the UCLA dorms went to see it in Westwood 7 or 8 times. We’d go around campus slapping each other on the head yelling, “bau” “bau” and holding up salt shakers and saying, “This is this. This isn’t anything else. This is this.”
It was definitely not considered a leftist movie at the time, at least not by us. We thought of it as the first pro Vietnam, Vietnam movie. It was the first and perhaps the only movie, until First Blood, the other Rambo films, Missing in Action, and may be one or two others, to depict martial courage positively in the context of Vietnam.
It’s really hard for people who weren’t old enough in the 70s to realize the power of the communist arguments, peace nicks etc. They were definitely ascendant until, the man opposed by the same elite Republican establishment that opposes Sarah Palin came on the scene and began speaking unashamedly and un-ironically about the greatness of America.

Okay, I officially remove The Deer Hunter from my list and send the whole question back to committee for further consideration.