Left Field Cinema

In 1978 Michael Cimino wrote and directed The Deer Hunter, considered by many to be one of the greatest war movies ever made, a massive award winner which took five Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Performance by a Supporting Actor for Christopher Walken. Personally I have some problems with The Deer Hunter, not least of which its borderline racist portrayal of the Vietnamese - but it is still a highly regarded film. At the time of its release it pushed Cimino to super director status in much the same way as Peter Jackson was after the success of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The Deer Hunter was his second film after Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, a Clint Eastwood staring movie with mixed reviews which wasn’t seen by a massive audience, so Cimino’s reputation as an excellent director was never in question. However, questioned it would be after his next film and the one we are examining today - Heaven’s Gate. Heaven’s Gate suffered critical and commercial disaster, as a result Cimino’s career never recovered, no longer trusted with big projects and very few actors or producers willing to work with him. He directed Year of the Dragon in 1985, the dreadful Christopher Lambert starring film The Sicilian in 1987, Desperate Hours in 1990 and the tonally erratic and somewhat misguided The Sunchaser in 1996. He’s not directed another feature in over a decade, with his first project in thirteen years currently in production, Man’s Fate which looks set for completion sometime in 2010. So why after such a promising start, has Cimino’s career derailed through the past thirty years? Well put simply, at the time of production Heaven’s Gate was the biggest flop in cinema history. When asked how the film affected his career Cimino described it as a “trauma” and since then he’s never been able to make the films he wanted to make, he’s always had to settle for less, and make the best out of very little.

At the time, United Artists gave Cimino carte blanche, their faith in Cimino to deliver would be the downfall of United Artists. After getting an initial budget of eleven million dollars, the project went over budget and eventually came in at forty-four million dollars which was a huge sum of money at the time for a single feature film. The film was cut down from five hours to just over three and a half hours, the initial press screenings were disastrous so Cimino re-cut the film to two hours and twenty minutes, and as a result the film tanked at the box office, United Artists lost so much money on the film that they were forced to file for bankruptcy, and were subsequently sold to MGM. Cimino now takes full responsibility for these events; he butchered his own film, not the studio as it was commonly thought for years.

Previously for the Misunderstood Modern Cinema series, I’ve reviewed films which I personally consider flawed but not nearly as dreadful as most critics and audiences believed. Heaven’s Gate is the first in this series which I not only consider unfairly maligned, but also consider a masterpiece. Heaven’s Gate is not only unjustly damned as a below average film spawned from an egotistical director high on his own success, it is in fact one of the very best films of the 1980’s, and Cimino’s greatest film.

Heaven’s Gate is a western, however is appears unlike any other western you’re ever likely to see. Based on historical events from 1890 Wyoming, a powerful group of land owners known as the association are in the midst of conflict with European immigrants who are trying to forge a life on the American frontier. The judicial system favours the immigrants, and the land owners decide that they must bypass the law in order to rid themselves of these interlopers. Their extreme solution is to create a death list with one-hundred and twenty-five names on it, and then hire a small army of bounty hunters and mercenaries to hunt down every man and woman on the list and kill them. Sheriff James Averill played by Kris Kristofferson comes to town and finds violence on the streets and murder brewing amongst civil unrest, he visits with his prostitute girlfriend Ella Watson played by a very young Issabelle Huppert; his former university friend from Harvard - Billy played by the incredible John Hurt; and a bar owner and prospector John played by Jeff Bridges. Slowly Averill gets a picture of the violently volatile situation and wants to convince Ella to leave before the situation explodes, but Ella is content with her life, she runs a successful brothel, and has everything she could want where she is. Averill isn’t the only one who wants Ella to leave, hired gun Nathan played by Christopher Walken wants to marry Ella and start a life together away from her prostitute occupation. A love triangle is formed with both men wanting the same thing, but neither of them may achieve their goal in the end as it comes to light that Ella’s name is also on the death list and the illegal army begin their march towards the town to kill the majority of the inhabitants.

There is no question of how this films budget ballooned out of control, from an incredible opening sequence which shows the Averill and Billy graduating in Harvard and going through ridiculous university rituals, and highly choreographed out door dance sequences. Although the sequence was actually shot in Oxford because of locations issues, a fact which will be entirely obvious to anyone who’s ever been to Oxford or watched an episode of Inspector Moorse. After the Harvard sequence the film skips ahead twenty-years to the time-frame that the majority of the rest of the film will play out in - Averill’s arrival in the town of Casper is one of the most dizzy sequences in the whole of film, horse carriages pass through the streets endlessly, hundreds of extras crowd the incredibly period accurate buildings and every one of these hundreds of extras have period perfect costumes. The attention to set and costume details is simply incredible, and likely to overwhelm audiences, at times you truly forget that you’re watching actors on a sound stage; it’s like Cimino travelled back in time to make the film. Cimino’s attention to detail and perfectionist mentality may have been the films undoing, however the upside is that it appears breath takingly real, a remarkable cinematic achievement which makes other period dramas appear fake or cheap by comparison. The general aesthetic of the film can be summarised in three words: dust, steam and smoke. Never has a Western created such an intoxicating and visceral sense of environment as Heaven’s Gate, individuals are often reduced to not much more than figures or silhouettes when held against the bleakness of the surrounding elements, you can taste the smoke, you can feel the dust in your eye, you can’t see for the steam from a passing train. This is accompanied by an incredible sense of wind; a bounty hunters coat flaps violently in the mountainous gales as he stands above his sleeping prey, the sound of air rushing past people is almost constant in some sequences, and the movement of the aforementioned dust, smoke and steam only emphasises the presence of most invisible of natural forces.

The wind, the sun, the ground, the air, the moody lighting - bars and saloon’s only have what minimal light is allowed in by the front doors, and a few gas lamps when they can be spared. All these elements combine to provide Heaven’s Gate with apparelled realism within the Western Genre to date, even allowing all of the immigrant dialogue to be in the native language of those who are speaking accompanied by subtitles. Cimino used horses entrails to make the films gorier sequences appear more disturbing; the films most disquieting of sequences sees Ella being raped by a gang of three killers, Cimino never flinches away from such horrendous activities instead he embraces them as part of the amoral and immoral landscape he is painting. Nathan is introduced gunning down an unarmed man at his home, his victim doesn’t even see Nathan as he hides behind a bed sheet hanging outside to dry. This is the world Cimino invites you to discover, far from the romanticised vision of the old frontier; this was the single grittiest portrayal of the West for many years, perhaps only David Milch’s HBO series Deadwood has over taken Heaven’s Gate in this regard.

The film elevates itself from a conventional Western to an epic, with some untypical cross over with the War film genre. It does this through a series of grand set pieces which are almost certain to dazzle audiences; the aforementioned Harvard graduation sequence and the Averill’s arrival into Casper are two of the more expensive sequences. But later as Averill relaxes with Ella, they and the entire community go to a roller skating rink and drunkenly circle the rink again and again as the band plays and violinist roller skates past them. The film changes appearance here and becomes sepia toned which adds even more to the sense of this happening at the time it is set, even the photography resembles the photography at the time. If Cimino could have gotten away with it, he might have processed the entire film in sepia, to add to the rich golden tones of the film. The skating Rink is named Heaven’s Gate, which is where the film takes its title from - it is the community - where the community come together in times of joy and later in times of crisis for a town meeting about their impending doom. Heaven’s Gate represents the immigrant workers spiritual home, more than the church, more than the bar, more than the brothel; this is where they all come together or fall apart.

The final set piece of the film is a epic battle as the workers decide to take on the Association and launch a pre-emptive strike against them, in a wide clearing the workers encircle the Association’s private army and attack them, the battle continues for hours, and only a mid point break disrupts what is essentially an hour of pure carnage. The first cut of the battle sequence Cimino made is alleged to have been as long as a feature film in its own right.

Heaven’s Gate is also of interest for the lack of a traditional score. John William’s was originally slated to compose the music, but had to drop out because the production ran over production schedule. David Mansfield took over, a young composer at the time, his elegant score has none of the grand hallmarks of the type of movie score you’d typically find accompanying a film of this nature – or the sort of music John Williams generally produces. Instead his gentle sparse score compliments the sparse dialogue and provides a dream like-quality to Heaven’s Gate as the Waltz slowly re-occurs at key character moments. Mansfield also played the previously mentioned roller skating violinist.

The films cast is another area for praise, Kristofferson and Walken in particular do their best work, neither have ever been better with the possible exception of Walken in The Deer Hunter, indeed Walken’s best work was done early in his career and on both occasions it was under Cimino’s direction. Cimino doesn’t type cast Walken in his typical villainous roles, although both his part here and in The Deer Hunter are slightly unhinged or intimidating types – but at this point Walken is far from the caricature he would later become. Hurt and Huppert are also accomplished in their roles and Bridges gives one of his finest performances in the understated role of Averill’s right hand man. Elsewhere, we see excellent appearance from Geoffrey Lewis and early roles for Brad Dourif, Terry O’Quinn, Tom Noonan, Mickey Rourke, and Willem Dafoe. Heaven’s Gate boasts an impressive cast which has only gained value over the years. Getting all of these actors back for the same film now would be quite difficult.

Not only are the performances uniformly excellent, but the characters are rounded three-dimensional individuals with as many virtues as vices, they are riddled with believable contradictions, and do not fulfil and easy stereotypes. Averill for example is a rich man, he’s graduated from Harvard, at one point O’Quinn’s character, Captain Minardi berates Averill by saying: “Do you know what I really dislike about you, Jim? You're a rich man with a good name. You only pretend to be poor.” Why this rich man pretends to be poor is a matter for speculation as Jim himself is far from forthcoming on the matter. Averill carries around a picture of himself and a younger woman from his Harvard days, what this woman means to him is perhaps easy to guess, but we are never explicitly told, what traumas Averill has suffered in his past we can also infer from the amount he drinks, at several points Averill nearly drinks himself into a comma, to the point where men can lift him from a prostitutes bed and carry him home without him ever realising. Averill keeps a wide range of company from a stern bar owner, to foreign prostitute, to an eccentric drunken intellectual - his mask never changes - he treats them all with the same respect when they deserve respect. Averill is a laconic man; he says little and rarely explains his actions to those around him.

Nate is another interesting character, one that Walken embraces, a rebellious man not afraid to shoot men dead or stand-up to the authorities when the time is right. Nate craves a piece of civilisation in the wilderness, he hopes to build a home with Ella, and covers the interior of his wooden shack with makeshift wallpaper, the wallpaper represents his piece of civilisation, it represents his hope for a normal life. Nate’s standout moment comes when he is informed that Ella is on the Associations death list, he confronts their leader Frank Canton played by Sam Waterson of Law and Order fame, Nate demands to see a warrant for every name on the list, Canton explains his political connections to Nate and that he represents the authority of the United States and the President, to which Nate pauses and then glibly state: “Yeah, fuck him to”.

Ella is also an interesting character, both Nate and Averill are trying to take her away from her life, Nate asks to marry her and Averill wants to take her away, but Ella craves her independence, she’s travelled a long way to get to the United States and she’s not going to leave without a fight. The problem is not that the life Averill or Nate could provide for her isn’t suitable or even desirable; the problem is that her life is her own, and she is truly happy where she is. Ella doesn’t need a man’s love, he doesn’t need to be protected - she would rather stand on principle than abandon the life she has forged for herself.

So why did Heaven’s Gate get such a negative reception upon first release? The answer I’m afraid is beyond my comprehension as I only see good in this film. There isn’t a single second of Heaven’s Gate I would change. The only complaint I could even conceive of is that it’s too long, but even this is a stretch, the film breezes by at 219 minutes, and it joins a number of key epics in cinema’s history which don’t feel nearly as long as they are, along with Once Upon a Time in America, and The Godfather Part II, the films are long but when viewing them they never feel long. Heaven’s Gate is so engaging, so decadent in design, so beautifully realised that the films extended run time is never an issue, in fact I would gladly sit through the original five hour cut were it still in circulation. There is the possibility that critical reaction was initially swayed by the sheer amount of money used and it is possible that rumours of the films budgetary problems had reached the ears of those first New York critics, when they reacted poorly to the film Cimino re-cut it and the inferior shorter cut was then pounced upon by the remaining critics. Or perhaps the film was simply ahead of its time, a film that most audiences were never going to appreciate until years later like Citizen Kane or Night of the Hunter. Whatever the reason, Heaven’s Gate has been unfairly castigated over the years, and it is high time for a revised assessment of this important work.

Please note, unfortunately for one reason or another Heaven’s Gate has never been released on region 2 DVD, it is however available from amazon.co.uk through market place vendors on region 1, or from other region 1 DVD distributors. But be warned there are two versions of the film in circulation, the 149 minute cut is still available, so be sure to purchase the 219 minute cut or risk a diminished viewing experience of this forgotten and overlooked masterpiece.

M.Dawson