“Heaven’s gate” (the movie that bankrupted UA and made Michael cimino a pariah) has always interested me. I have never seen the movie straight through-just bits and pieces. The movie is much too long, and kris kristofferson isn’t much of an actor. but, does the film present any grand vision of the American West? or is it just an overlong turd? There seems to be no great call for the flick-the one copy that my library has has seldom been checked out.
Incidentally, did Cimino ever recover from this disaster?
It has some good parts, but they, like all other scenes, usually drag on for twenty minutes longer than necessary. Cimino obviously got a big head from Deer Hunter and had no one to reel him in and exhibit any control over the film.
And no, he did not recover- check out his IMDB page. A few no name films since 1980, nothing of note.
Sorry for double post- below is a link to a very good documentary that highlights the excesses that went into the making of the film. I also read they transplanted the entire cast and crew to England for a scene at Oxford that is short and really not important to the film, and could have easily been filmed at dozens of US schools.
That documentary was based on Stephen Bach’s essential book Final Cut, a read both entertaining and horrifying in the indulgences that Cimino took.
It is not a good film. It’s not enjoyably bad, just interminably bad, with almost all the major actors (Huppert, Kristofferson, Hurt) inept, miscast, or wasted. Brad Dourif is the only one that comes across well, and while there are some magical moments, too much of the film is trying to impress you with its scope and grandeur and “historical drama” (much of which was invented for the film) to allow any air in. It is long, beautifually shot, and almost completely inert (though fairly violent at times).
I got to see the full director’s cut, complete with intermission, a while back. I wrote up a capsule for aintitcool. Verdict: “While it’s hardly the artistic disaster it was labeled on its release, it’s also not quite the masterpiece festival organizers trumpeted it as, either.”
Worth seeing, with an open mind.
Which director’s cut did you see? IIRC didn’t he first cut it to like a 5-hour movie then pulled it and re-edited? Just wondering which version you saw.
That documentary mentioned above is very interesting…insights into the movie industry and the creative process. Some of the anecdotes told by the cast (Jeff Bridges, Brad Dourif) are also very enlightening.
It has gorgeous cinematography. The most beautifully-lit cock fight, for example.
We rented it back in the days of VHS, it came ot two cassettes. Not one out of five of us could bring ourselves to pop the tape in.
Ghastly boring. Not worth anyone’s time.
It was the three hours and forty minute version as originally released. There are two other incarnations: the five-hour version that was initially showed to the studio, and which has never been seen by anyone since then, and the version that got pulled, re-edited, and re-released, which runs about two and a half. This was basically a rare opportunity to see Cimino’s first public release on the big screen instead of at home.
It has its moments - some glorious - and definitely works better on a big screen than on TV. It’s sufficiently slow and elliptical that you just do have to devote the four hours or whatever in the dark to let it wash over you. It’s still ultimately a mess, but you can sort of see what he was aiming for.
It also clearly has its partisan enthusiasts; when the NFT screened it about two years back, there were those making a point of applauding it at the end. (And they weren’t simply releaved that it’d stopped.)
And I’ll second ArchiveGuy’s recommendation of Bach.
Well, the prologue is meant to be at Harvard, but they refused to allow the shoot on campus. What’s probably most notorious about this sequence is that the budget for it was $3 million, when the budget for the entire film had at one stage been envisaged as only $7 million. The question of whether or not to commit to the extra expense is central to the endgame of the whole fiasco in Bach’s account.
Vilmos Zsigmond.
This is ‘The Film That Killed United Artists’. A ‘$40 million flop’. That’s as it may be; but I think it’s a beautiful film. As has been said, the cinematography was brilliant. I appreciated that it was about a little-known incident in the American West (the lynching of ‘Cattle Kate’ and the events leading up to it). The costuming and props were quite accurate. And Isabelle Huppert gets naked.
But the Harvard scene (specifically the dancing) went on entirely too long. The audio may have been true to the times, but in a movie I’d like to hear what’s being said. The barn dance also went on too long. I understand the intention, depicting the upper-class dance and then later the dance of the poor people, but they were still too long.
Overall though, this is one of my favourite Westerns.
That’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. There’s a big barn dance, about 300 people are packed into a large room. Then the leading man and lady step out as the dance ends. 10 or so people walk out the only apparent exit, then the couple steps back in to a now empty barn.
That, and many other moments just as clearly inept, took me right out of the film. I don’t like to be smarter than the movies I watch.
To me, the disaster lies not so much in the film itself as in the interminable trainwreck of its making. This stemmed in large part from Cimino’s vision of himself as an auteur, which was fed lavishly by his girlfriend — who just happened to be in charge of production.
Case in point: one of the streetfront sets was deemed too narrow by (I believe) six feet, so the construction foreman started to demolish one side so that it could be rebuilt six feet further back. But this offended Cimino’s delicate sensibility, and he demanded that both sides be torn down and moved back three feet. Granted, there may have been something in the background which he wanted to center on the street, but there are myriad ways to create that illusion short of wasting umpteen thousand dollars.
(I’d like to join the chorus of praise for Final Cut. In addition, for those unwilling to invest that much time, HG is featured in The Hollywood Hall of Shame, along with such celebrated stinkers as Inchon, The Conqueror and Kolberg.)
Not in my opinion. I watched his 1996 film The Sunchaser, which starred Woody Harrelson and Anne Bancroft, and while the scenery was pretty, the movie was a painful pile of shit to watch. It’s almost like a Rush Limbaugh parody of liberals: the oncologist who’s probably saved hundreds of lives is bad because he’s white, drives an expensive car and worries about his mortgage, while the 16-year-old multiple murderer is good because he’s poor and half-Navajo, which makes him, like, all spiritual 'n stuff.
I do recall the ridiculous garduation scenes (it was supposed to be harvard University)-why they had to go all the way to Cambridge (England) was beyond me! The hokey scenes where the Norwegian immigrant farmer was trying to escape (shouting in norwegian) was hilarious-they had english subtitles. The really weird part-Kristofferson’s GF (forget her name) goes for a nude swim (she was HOT!)-and ol’ Kris FALLS ASLEEP!! (was he gay or something?). like others have observed-it could have been a half-decnt western-if it was half as long!
But according to the Final Cut, the part about it bankrupting UA was a myth, something to do with UA being part of another huge billion dollar corp, and 40 mil was only a drop in the bucket to them.
One of the most visually beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. It has flaws, but nothing as bad as the industry says. I separate the production clusterfuck from the movie itself. I know I’m the Lone Ranger, but I love this movie.