Following the incredible success of The Deer Hunter, Oscar winning director Michael Cimino embarked on what would be one of the great follies of cinema history.
Betting his own career – and the bank balance of his studio, United Artists – on an epic production, this sweeping, visionary critique of American expansionism was supposed to be the director’s masterpiece. Yet after a troubled production it became a critical and commercial disaster, and is often blamed for the closure of United Artists, who went bust after the film was released.
Kris Kristofferson plays a Harvard graduate who relocates to Wyoming to become a federal marshal. Learning that wealthy cattle barons are planning to murder the area’s European settlers for their land, the resulting battle will be a bloody struggle for America’s soul, with a huge supporting cast (including Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert) caught up in the fighting.
Inspired by the Johnson County War of 1892, Heaven’s Gate finished a year behind schedule, and cost a whopping $44 million, with 220 hours and 1.3 million feet of film in the can by the time shooting finally wrapped. Cimino’s 229 cut had one disastrous screening in 1980, before United Artists withdrew it from cinemas, later releasing a two and a half hour version as unpopular as it was incoherent.
Considered a byword for cinematic excess for decades afterwards, and accused of both ruining United Artists and ending the director-driven cinema that had characterised New Hollywood, Heaven’s Gate was finally reclaimed as a masterpiece when Cimino’s original cut of Heaven’s Gate was restored in 2012.
A savage and ravishingly shot demystification of western movie lore, few films can match Heaven’s Gate’s epic beauty, ambitious storytelling, historical sweep, or potent, original vision.