Heaven’s Gate is almost impossible to view as a simple movie. It’s perhaps the most famous bomb in cinema history, credited with closing down a studio single-handedly, and offered up as a prime example of what happens when a megalomaniac director gets final cut. Originally a five-hour epic costing a whopping $40m (this was back when you could make ET for $10.5 million), it was cut to three hours, released to a perfect storm of critical rage and public indifference, and disappeared having taken less than half a million at the box office.
Its huge losses caused studio United Artists to be sold to MGM, and director Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) didn’t work again for five years. Indeed, his career has never really recovered from the pounding he took.
Now, over 30 years later we get a restored version of 216 minutes still long enough and can look back more objectively at the film that still makes movie executives wince. Is it a total turkey or a lost masterpiece? Actually it’s a bit of both but much more of the former.
It has a remarkable similarity to Revolution, which itself got a re-release last year. Both are westerns of sorts, dealing with the birth of the American nation. Both bankrupted studios Goldcrest in the case of Revolution both had terrible over-runs and filming conditions, both had reputations which preceded them and both virtually disappeared in the UK before anyone had a chance to see them.
Both also have a turgid pace, no sexual chemistry, some dodgy acting, little drive and both have, crucially, no soul. In the case of Heaven’s Gate it also suffers from a severe lack of focus what’s it about, actually?
Director Cimino has to take the blame, as he was not only the obsessive director but also the writer his script is all over the place, veering from ye olde English to sweary Americanisms. One of the many stories about the film’s painful filming was that by day five it was four days behind schedule. High on the success of The Deer Hunter, Cimino was given virtual carte blanche to make his third film, originally a fairly simple western.
At this point he seems to have turned into Stanley Kubrick and not in a good way. He had sets built, then tore then down because they looked fake. He hired a crew, then fired them, then hired them again. His biggest folly was building an irrigation system under a field so the grass would look greener for a bloody battle.
As is so often the case in these things, very little of this obsessive behaviour is on the screen. Like its British brother Revolution it looks grubby, brown and depressing, with the odd shot of sunshine on the mountains almost saving the day.
Also the plot and themes are hard to follow. It tells the story of James Averill (Kris Kristofferson), a Harvard lawyer who discovers the rich kids who went to his university have formed a fellowship. They intend to kill the poor immigrant owners of land in Wyoming and claim the soil the worst type of racism. Averill determines to travel out to the land and warn the people, and inevitably it all ends in a huge admittedly well-staged battle.
It’s based on a true story, and in the right hands could have been a stirring tale of the people fighting against tyranny but Cimino’s were not the right hands. The pacing is far too slow, the script too mangled, and the attempt to get some love interest in there, in the form of Isabelle Huppert’s tart with a heart, is a disaster. Kristofferson and Christopher Walken are the two men fighting for her heart, but when one studio executive saw the film he exclaimed: “they’re much more likely to f*** each other.
The opening sequence is a perfect example of the problem of the whole film. It shows Kristofferson’s graduation ceremony at Harvard, getting his degree, dancing round the quadrant, slugging back the booze and hugging his pals. It’s around the 20-minute mark, looks lovely and tells us precisely nothing about his character. We see his pal John Hurt doing the graduation speech, but there is no insight into his motivation. Both men look at least 20 years too old to be undergraduates.
Once we get to Wyoming the pace grinds to almost a standstill surely Cimino himself could see that the film desperately needed more movement? By the time we get to the final battle sequence it’s almost impossible to care for the poor, smudgy-faced immigrants who are fighting for their future.
In amongst all this mess there are a few actors trying their hearts out. Jeff Bridges is as solid as ever, and has said he likes the film more each time he sees it. Walken is terribly miscast but exudes the edginess he was to perfect over the next 20 years, while Kristofferson is hammy in places.
Huppert is a disaster, looking like she’s just walked out of a shampoo advert and emoting away with all the subtlety of a brick. Throwing her clothes off every five minutes only draws attention to her strange lack of sex appeal.
As if the film didn’t have enough to contend with, it has a genuinely bleak ending that must have lost the few remaining souls who stuck it out in that original five-hour version.
Film buffs know that in the film Apocalypse Now, those words only appear halfway through graffitied on a rock here again there is no title sequence, so the only mention of the words Heaven’s Gate are on the side of Jeff Bridges’ rollerskating rink.
Overall verdict: One of the biggest flops the world has ever seen now gets a scrubbed up re-release and a just-manageable three and half hour running time. All of its flaws are there to see and wince at again, but it’s hard to sit through and impossible to love. It’s a famous part of film history, but not for positive reasons. There are a few things to enjoy, but they are few and far between, overall it’s a poorly-written, sluggish western.
Reviewer: Mike Martin