Heaven's Gate (film)

''Heaven's Gate'' is a 1980 American epic Western film written and directed by Michael Cimino, starring Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Isabelle Huppert, Jeff Bridges, and Joseph Cotten. Loosely based on the Johnson County War, it revolves around a dispute between land barons and European immigrants in Wyoming in the 1890s.

Cimino's follow-up to his critically acclaimed film ''The Deer Hunter'' (1978), the film's production faced numerous setbacks, including cost overruns, significant retakes, bad press (including allegations of animal abuse on set), and rumors about Cimino's allegedly authoritarian directorial style. Cimino had an expensive and ambitious vision for the film, pushing the film nearly four times over its planned budget.

After its premiere in November 1980, the film received significant critical backlash, prompting United Artists to pull it from theaters. In April 1981, a truncated re-cut version of the film was released, though it remained a financial failure, earning only $3.5 million against its $44 million budget, and was subsequently condemned as one of the worst films ever made. According to some film historians, such as Peter Biskind, the film's financial failure resulted in the demise of director-driven film production in the American film industry, steering back toward greater studio control of films.

In the decades since the release, however, general assessment of ''Heaven's Gate'' has become more favorable. The 1981 re-edit has been characterized as "one of the greatest injustices of cinematic history", while later re-edits have received critical acclaim. In 2015, BBC Culture ranked ''Heaven's Gate'' 98th on its list of the 100 greatest American films of all time.

Plot

In 1870, two young men, Jim Averill and Billy Irvine graduate from Harvard College. The Reverend Doctor speaks to the graduates on the association of "the cultivated mind with the uncultivated" and the importance of education. Irvine, the class orator, follows this with his opposing, irreverent views. A celebration is then held, after which the male students serenade the women present, including Averill's girlfriend.

Twenty years later, Averill is passing through the booming town of Casper, Wyoming, on his way north to Johnson County, where he is now a marshal. Poor European immigrants new to the region are in conflict with wealthy, established cattle barons organized as the Wyoming Stock Growers Association; the newcomers sometimes steal their cattle for food. Nate Championa friend of Averill and an enforcer for the stockmenkills a settler for suspected rustling and dissuades another from stealing a cow.

At a board meeting, the head of the Association, Frank Canton, tells members, including a drunk Irvine, of plans to kill 125 named settlers, as thieves and anarchists, with the help of the cruel Major Wolcott. Irvine leaves the meeting, encounters Averill, and tells him of the Association's plans. As Averill leaves, he exchanges bitter words with Canton. Canton and Averill quarrel and Canton is knocked to the floor. That night, Canton recruits men to kill the named settlers.

Ella Watson, a Johnson County bordello madam from Quebec, who accepts stolen cattle as payment for use of her prostitutes, is infatuated with both Averill and Champion. Averill and Watson skate in a crowd, then dance alone, in an enormous roller skating rink called "Heaven's Gate," which has been built by local entrepreneur John L. Bridges. Averill receives a copy of the Association's death list from a baseball-playing U.S. Army captain and later reads the names aloud to the settlers, who are thrown into terrified turmoil. Cully, a station master and friend of Averill's, sees the train with Canton's posse heading north and rides off to warn the settlers but is murdered ''en route''. Later, a group of men come to Watson's bordello and rape her. Averill shoots and kills all but one of them. Champion, realizing that his landowner bosses seek to eliminate Watson, goes to Canton's camp and shoots the remaining rapist, then refuses to participate in the slaughter.

Canton, Wolcott and their men encounter one of Champion's friends leaving a cabin with Champion and his friend Nick inside, and a gunfight ensues. Attempting to save Champion, Watson arrives in her wagon and shoots one of the hired guns before escaping on horseback. Nick is killed before Canton's men push a burning cart towards the cabin, setting it on fire. Champion writes a last letter to Ella. Champion emerges from the burning cabin shooting at Canton's men but is killed by a hail of bullets. Watson warns the settlers of Canton's approach at another huge, chaotic gathering at "Heaven's Gate." The coward mayor of the county, Charlie Lezak, proposes to deliver the people on the list peacefully, while the young pharmacist Eggleston claims that the only way to survive is to brace the weapons and fight the enemy army. The agitated settlers approve Eggleston's idea, and they rush to battle with Bridges and Ella leading them. With the hired invaders now surrounded, both sides suffer casualties (including a drunken, poetic Irvine) as Canton leaves to bring help. Watson and Averill return to Champion's charred and smoking cabin, and discover his corpse, along with a handwritten letter documenting his last minutes alive.

The next day, Averill reluctantly joins the immigrant settlers, with their cobbled-together siege machines and explosive charges, in an attack against Wolcott's men and their makeshift fortifications. The battle is fiercer and more desperate. Despite the heavy losses that the immigrants suffer, including Eggleston himself, they manage to inflict a huge number of casualties on the mercenaries' army. Wolcott himself, while trying to escape, is killed by Averill, who hits him with an explosive charge. Before the settlers manage to wipe out the enemies, the US Army shows up with Canton and Minardi, thus stopping the battle. The mercenaries are put under arrest, though Averill is aware that this is just a facade to save them and make them avoid a criminal charge.
Later, at Watson's cabin, Bridges, Watson, and Averill prepare to leave for good, but they are ambushed by Canton and two others. Averill and Bridges shoot and kill Canton and one of his men but both Bridges and Watson are killed. A grief-stricken Averill holds Watson's body in his arms.

In 1903, about a decade later, a well-dressed, beardless, but older-looking Averill walks the deck of his yacht off Newport, Rhode Island. He goes below, where an attractive middle-aged woman is sleeping in a luxurious boudoir. The woman, Averill's old Harvard girlfriend (perhaps now his wife), awakens and asks him for a cigarette. Silently he complies, lighting the cigarette and returning to the deck.

Cast

In addition, musician Ronnie Hawkins appears in the first of his few acting roles, as Major Wolcott; the film's composer David Mansfield appears onscreen as John DeCory, the leader of the Heaven's Gate Band and an employee of Ella; Rosie Vela (credited as Roseanne Vela) appears as the "Beautiful Girl" whom Averill falls for at Harvard; future Golden Globe winner and Academy Award nominee Mickey Rourke appears in his second-ever screen role as Nick Ray; and future multi-Academy Award nominee Willem Dafoe makes his first, uncredited, screen appearance as Willy.

Production

Historical basis

The basic plot elements of the film were inspired by Wyoming's 1892 Johnson County War, the archetypal cattlemen-homesteaders conflict, which also served as the background for ''Shane'' and '' The Virginian''.
Most of the film's principal characters bear the names of actual key figures in the war, but the events portrayed in ''Heaven's Gate'' bear little resemblance to actual historical events.Davis, John W. (2010). Wyoming Range War: The Infamous Invasion of Johnson County. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. .

While homesteaders did begin to settle northern Wyoming in the 1890s, claiming land under the newly enacted Homestead Acts, there were no hordes of starving European immigrants, killing rich men's cattle to feed their families, as depicted in the film. Nate Champion, who is portrayed as a murderer and "enforcer" for the stockmen, was actually a popular small rancher in Johnson County, nicknamed "king of the rustlers" by the stockmen because he resisted their tactic of claiming all unbranded young cattle as their own.

Jim Averell was another homesteader who lived about southwest of Johnson County. Two years before the invasion began, he and his common-law wife Ella Watson were murdered by stockmen, who falsely accused Watson of exchanging sexual favors for stolen cattle. There is no evidence that Watson was a bordello madam, as portrayed in the film, nor that Watson or Averell ever knew Nate Champion.

Screenplay

In 1971, film director Michael Cimino submitted an original script for ''Heaven's Gate'' (then called ''The Johnson County War'') but the project was shelved when it failed to attract big-name talent. His directorial debut, ''Thunderbolt and Lightfoot'' (1974), was a hit. In 1979, on the eve of winning two Academy Awards (Best Director and Best Picture) for 1978's ''The Deer Hunter,'' Cimino convinced United Artists to resurrect the ''Heaven's Gate'' project with Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, and Christopher Walken as the main characters. He was given an initial budget of $11.6 million, but was also provided with ''carte blanche''.

Filming

Principal photography began on April 16, 1979, in Glacier National Park, east of Kalispell, Montana, with the majority of the town scenes filmed in the Two Medicine area, north of the village of East Glacier Park. Shooting also included the town of Wallace, Idaho. Harvard University refused to allow the film to be shot there, reportedly because of Cimino's excessive demands for the film set, and the film's prologue was instead shot at the University of Oxford. The project had a December 14 projected release date and $11.6 million budget, and promptly fell behind schedule.

According to legend, by the sixth day of filming the project was already five days behind schedule. As an example of Cimino's fanatical attention to detail, a street built to his precise specifications had to be torn down and rebuilt because it reportedly "didn't look right." The street in question needed to be six feet wider; the set construction boss said it would be cheaper to tear down one side and move it back six feet, but Cimino insisted that both sides be dismantled and moved back three feet, then reassembled. An entire tree was cut down, moved in pieces, and relocated to the courtyard in Oxford, England where the Harvard 1870 graduation scene was shot. Cimino had an irrigation system built under the land where the major battlefield scene would unfold so that it would remain vividly green, to contrast with the red color.

Cimino shot more than 1.3 million feet (400,000 metres; nearly 220 hours) of footage, costing the studio approximately $200,000 per day in salary (equivalent to $720,000 in 2022), locations and acting fees. Privately, it was joked that Cimino wished to surpass Francis Ford Coppola's mark of shooting one million feet of footage for ''Apocalypse Now'' (1979).

Cimino's obsessive behavior soon earned him the nickname "The Ayatollah". Production fell behind schedule as rumors spread of Cimino's demanding up to 50 takes of individual scenes and delaying filming until a cloud that he liked rolled into the frame. As a result of the delays, several musicians originally brought to Montana to work on the film for only three weeks ended up stranded, waiting to be called for shoots to materialize. The experience, as the Associated Press put it, "was both stunningly boring and a raucous good time, full of jam sessions, strange adventures and curiously little actual shooting." The jam sessions served as the beginning of numerous musical collaborations between Bridges and Kristofferson.

As production staggered forward, United Artists seriously considered firing Cimino and replacing him with another director, implied in the book ''Final Cut'' to be Norman Jewison.

Actor John Hurt reportedly spent so long waiting around on the production for something to do that he went off and made ''The Elephant Man'' (1980) for David Lynch in the interim, and then came back to shoot more scenes on ''Heaven's Gate''.

''Heaven's Gate'' finished shooting in March 1980, having cost nearly $30 million. Reportedly, during post-production Cimino changed the lock to the studio's editing room, prohibiting executives from seeing the film until he completed his cut, although Cimino disputed this story. Working with Oscar-winning editor William H. Reynolds, Cimino worked doggedly over his project.

Post-production

On June 26, 1980, Cimino previewed a workprint for executives at United Artists that reportedly ran five hours and twenty-five minutes (325 minutes), which Cimino said was "about 15 minutes longer than the final cut would be."

The executives flatly refused to release the film at that length and once again contemplated firing Cimino. However, Cimino promised them he could re-edit the film and spent the entire summer and fall of 1980 doing so, finally paring it down to its original premiere length of 3 hours and 39 minutes (219 minutes). The original wide-release opening on Christmas of 1979 had come and gone, so UA and Cimino finally set up a release date of November 1980.

Release

Box office

Following a brief theatrical release in November 1980, during which the film was poorly received by critics, United Artists decided to pull the film from theaters, re-releasing it in April 1981 in a truncated cut. Despite the efforts to capitalize on the film with a re-release, it was a significant financial failure, earning $3.5 million domestically against its $44 million budget. The film is considered one of the biggest box office bombs of all time.

Critical response

During an intermission at the film's November 19, 1980 premiere at the New York Cinema 1 theater, the audience was so subdued that Cimino was said to have asked why no one was drinking the champagne. He was reportedly told by his publicist, "Because they hate the movie, Michael."

The initial critical reception to the film was almost universally negative. ''The New York Times'' critic Vincent Canby panned the film, calling it "something quite rare in movies these days - an unqualified disaster," comparing it to "a forced four-hour walking tour of one's own living room." Canby went even further by stating that " fails so completely 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."

After a sparsely attended one-week run, Cimino and United Artists quickly pulled the film from any further releases, completely postponing a full worldwide release.

On April 24, 1981, the film opened in 810 theatres in a "director's cut", a two-hour-and-twenty-nine minute (149 minute) version that Cimino had recut for a third time. Reviewing the shorter cut in the ''Chicago Sun-Times'', Roger Ebert criticized the film's formal choices and its narrative inconsistencies and incredulities, concluding that the film was " e most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen, and remember, I've seen '' Paint Your Wagon''." He also called the film one of the ugliest he'd ever seen. Kevin Thomas of the ''Los Angeles Times'' issued a dissenting opinion when he reviewed the shortened film, becoming one of its few American champions and calling it "a true screen epic" while stating that in two decades as a critic, he had never felt "so totally alone." Thomas' paper actually had its former lead film critic and editor come out of retirement to write a thoroughly negative front-page review of the movie for its Arts section, and moved Thomas' positive review to an interior page of that section.

The film grossed $1.3 million in its opening weekend and closed after the second week, having grossed only $3.5 million against its $44 million budget.

In 1999, ''Time'' placed the film on a list of the 100 worst ideas of the 20th century.

Writing in ''The Guardian'' in 2008, Joe Queenan declared ''Heaven’s Gate'' the worst film made up to that time. “This is a movie that destroyed the director's career,” he wrote. “This is a movie that lost so much money it literally drove a major American studio out of business. This is a movie about Harvard-educated gunslingers who face off against eastern European sodbusters in an epic struggle for the soul of America. This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that defies belief.”

''The Verge'' said that "Based on 30 years of critical assessment, Heaven's Gate stands as one of the worst movies ever made. That's not an exaggeration".

Reassessments

In subsequent years, some critics have come to the film's defense, beginning with European critics who praised it after the film played at the Cannes Film Festival.Khan, Omar
"''Heaven's Gate'' (1981)"
Robin Wood was an early champion of ''Heaven's Gate'' and its reassessment, calling it "one of the few authentically innovative Hollywood films ... It seems to me, in its original version, among the supreme achievements of the Hollywood cinema." David Thomson calls the film "a wounded monster" and argues that it takes part in "a rich American tradition ( Melville, James, Ives, Pollock, Parker) that seeks a mighty dispersal of what has gone before. In America, there are great innovations in art that suddenly create fields of apparent emptiness. They may seem like omissions or mistakes at first. Yet in time we come to see them as meant for our exploration." Martin Scorsese has said that the film has many overlooked virtues. Some of these critics have attempted to impugn the motives of the earliest reviewers. Robin Wood noted, in his initial review of the film, reviewers tended to pile on the film, attempting to "outdo ne anther with sarcasm and contempt." Several members of the cast and crew have complained that the initial reviews of the film were tainted by its production history and that daily critics were reviewing it as a business story as much as a motion picture. In April 2011, the staff of ''Time Out London'' selected ''Heaven's Gate'' as the 12th greatest Western of all time. While Peter Biskind covered the many excesses and problems with the movie in his book ''Easy Riders, Raging Bulls'', he also noted that ''Heaven's Gate'' was not dissimilar to other big-budget, troubled projects of the late 1970s and early 1980s (such as Steven Spielberg's ''1941'' and Warren Beatty's ''Reds''), and that the backlash against ''Heaven's Gate'' could have easily been directed elsewhere. Biskind speculated that Michael Cimino's personal unpopularity was the main reason this film became so widely reviled. Philip French praised the film in his original review.

In the fall of 2012, the film was re-released to "soak up acclaim" as a 216-minute "director's cut" at the 69th Venice Film Festival. on August 30 in the presence of Cimino, followed one month later by screening at the New York Film Festival in the "Masterwork" lineup, along with Laurence Olivier's ''Richard III'' and Frank Oz's director's cut of '' Little Shop of Horrors''. It was then shown at the Festival Lumière in France, where Venice Festival director Alberto Barbera described the film as an "absolute masterpiece" that had disappeared, and whose 1980 cutting was characterized as a "massacre" by nervous producers and had been "one of the greatest injustices of cinematic history" that had destroyed careers (Cimino and Kristofferson) following "annihilat ng critical reviews.

In March 2013, the new director's cut was again featured back in New York City in a week-long run screening at the Film Forum. Writing in the ''New York Times'', critic Manohla Dargis said of the restoration that it "looks good projected, if surprisingly bright", and "it also appears to be an act of directorial revisionism." Of the film itself she writes, "The film’s scope, natural backdrops, massive sets, complex choreography and cinematography are seductive, at times stunning, and if you like watching swirling people and cameras, you may love it."

An article by Nicholas Barber on the BBC
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