February 23, 2005
Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate revisited
It's the 25th anniversary of Michael Cimino's Heaven Gate, the film that bankrupted United Artists (which was saved by the Bond film For Your Eyes Only). A piece in The Guardian suggests that it still evokes controversy.
[W]hen the film was first released in New York, he became a nationwide object of scorn. Vincent Canby's review in the New York Times set the tone: "Heaven's Gate fails so completely," he wrote, "that you might suspect Mr Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect." Stung by the reviews, Cimino withdrew his film from circulation. He re-edited it, shortening it by 70 minutes, but it still did lousy business.
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In 1978 Michael Cimino, flush with success from his latest feature “The Deer Hunter” was the toast of tinsel town. Critics and fans alike were hailing this young new talent as the thinking man’s “wunderkind”. At the 1979 Academy Awards ceremony The Deerhunter walked away with 6 Oscars including best picture and best director. It seemed there was little Cimino could do wrong. For his next project, the director announced a grand plan to bring the past to life with an epic tale of American frontier life. Fans and critics waited with baited breath. The film was “Heaven’s Gate”.
More commonly known as the film that bankrupted United Artists with its runaway budget, “Heaven’s Gate” became a universal synonym for directorial arrogance and rampant megalomania. Cimino’s ambitious range war western was widely derided when it was originally released in 1980 and died at the box office after numerous pull-backs and re-cuts. Critics who had opposed the praise heaped on “The Deer Hunter” formed queues round the block to vent their disgust and opinions in a hail of venomous critiques and “I told you so’s”. To date, the director’s career has never recovered.
Production for Heaven’s Gate started in the summer of 1979. Set in turn of the century Wyoming, the story is based on the actual events of the Johnson County war, were dirt poor immigrants from Eastern Europe banded together to fight off the brutal tyranny of the wealthy cattle barons, who, having hired a murderous army of mercenaries were seizing the land all around.
Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Isabelle Huppert, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, and Mickey Rourke are among a cast swept up in what becomes after a richly textured first hour, a firestorm of conflict, mayhem and terrible escalating violence. The Final showdown between the immigrants and the regiments of killers sent to destroy them challenges anything by Peckinpah and the film’s long, almost silent coda is haunting.
With a cast and crew so huge one could see that filming wasn’t going to be easy, especially when the Montana winter kicked in bringing snow and strong winds. Filming was forced to stop numerous times as roads and locations were buried and equipment froze up. But over the course of 165 days and 1.5 million feet of film, production finally came to an end.
Already, rumours were churning in the Hollywood gossip mills. Stories of tantrums, cast infighting and overblown budgets were already blighting the film before it’s release. Cimino was defending his project before a reel had even been shown. The knives were out and “Heaven’s Gate” was on the menu.
So where did it all go wrong? One could point the finger at the director’s obsessive eye for detail. This led to the original $8,000,000 budget growing to a whopping $36,000,000 within a matter of months. Cimino also insisted on take after take of scenes which the actors and crew could scarcely see any difference between. “More smoke” he would scream for some scenes, “less dust” in another. At one point the director stopped filming all together and ordered the entire set, a life size replica frontier town, to be pulled down and rebuilt again. The reason? He thought it looked too new and wanted to give it some authentic wear and tear. “Every article of clothing, every structure, every sign, is based on a photograph of the period” he declared to American Film magazine. The 150 carpenters, the vintage locomotives and the 80 teams of horses and real life cowboys were all testament to his vision.
The real reason this movie bombed wasn’t its lack of story line as has been believed, but its director’s refusal to draw definitive lines between good and bad. There are no heroes in “Heaven’s Gate”. Instead of the usual broad shouldered white stetson’d handsome stranger we get Kris Kristofferson’s Jim Averill. A Harvard educated rich boy with delusions of grandeur, a scorching drink problem and fear of commitment.
Averill rally’s the immigrants into a semi-fit fighting force to take on the ruthless mercenaries, but their inevitable failure is the films key point. Were as in your standard Hollywood epic we see the struggle for survival rewarded with a rosy sugar coated ending, “Heaven’s Gate” makes no such attempt. The final bloody battle, were the 2 groups meet leads you to believe it very well might do so. But just as it looks like an immigrant victory is immanent, the American Army swoop in and decimate the crippled hotch potch brigade. The scene is absolutely heartbreaking but Cimino’s point is very clear. Hard honest work isn’t always the best policy. Good does not always triumph over Evil.
As America headed into the Reagan years, the hangover from Watergate, Vietnam and a sizable downturn in industry was all but unbearable. America needed a cure, and the seed for this we can see in films like “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters”. Feel good films with a hefty moral and bleached white smiles were the order of the day. The 70’s, the renaissance decade of cinema was dead and “Heaven’s Gate” was the final nail in the coffin. There were no more Deer Hunters and no more Taxi Drivers.
The era of special effects was to change the way we viewed cinema forever. Hollywood felt the need to rewrite history with the Vietnam debacle and spent the 80’s winning the war with actors like Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone.
Gone were the anti-heroes, replaced by one-dimensional cartoon cut outs and cocky one-liners. Dead were the thought provoking story lines and complex characters. Instead, the studios felt obligated to hold our hands and walk us through their synthetic interpretation of truth, justice and the American way.
Today, “Heaven’s Gate” is a film crying out for reappraisal. The 24 years since its release have seen some sobering changes in both the real world and the world of cinema. The western has made an astonishing come back in the last 14 years and the unaccredited influence of “Heaven’s Gate” can be seen in all of them.
“Dances with Wolves” and “Unforgiven” in particular owe a great debt to Cimino’s vision of the past. And let’s not forget that these films are Academy Award winning stalwarts of the genre. More recently, “Open Range”, “The Alamo” (2004) and the award winning HBO T.V. series “Deadwood” all continue in this vain. American hearts and minds seem to be opening once again to this unique and homegrown love affair with the past.
Let’s hope “Heaven’s Gate” finally gets the acclaim it so thoroughly deserves in its own country and is at last recognised for being the masterpiece the French already told us it was.
Posted by: Roy O'Rourke | Mar 12, 2005 7:07:13 AM
Oh, oui, the French, the arbiters of cinematic taste! Can you imagine a Cimino movie with Jerry Lewis and Le Petomane? Formidable!
Posted by: Uwe Boll | Jul 19, 2006 6:27:17 PM
Jerry Lewis and Le Petomane? Hmmm, didn't George Lucas already do that with Jar Jar Binks?
Posted by: Roy O'Rourke | Dec 18, 2006 6:20:25 AM
Just saw Heaven's Gate for the first - but decidedly not the last - time. It is brilliant. Like everything human beings make it has its flaws. One would be stupid to pretend otherwise. This connects to the lack of perfect heroes in the film - guess what. In real life there are none. We all have feet of clay.
And we should note - particularly today, when corporations all around us have an impact on our lives to an inordinate degree - that it was not the film that bankrupted the studio, but TransAmerica the corporation who wanted out of United Artists.
Cimino, where are you and why are you not making another movie!!!!!!!!
Posted by: HvH | Aug 5, 2007 1:00:17 AM
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