I don’t have access to digital TV at home, so it was a delight to be in a hotel room in Wollongong, turn on the TV to SBS World Movies and see that Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) was coming up shortly, which I’d always been meaning to see. I remember reading MAD magazines from the 1980s where its title was used as a punch-line, synonymous with “Box Office Bomb”. Now with restored longer versions, it has a better critical reputation, though still marked as the film that killed the auteur era of Hollywood filmmaking from the 1970s (as mythologised in the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls). I’m not sure what cut this was, three hours long with ads (I believe there is a longer Final Cut available with a clearer ending). Anyway, I found it a compelling Western epic with amazing sequences and iconic shots. The king of downer westerns had already been made at this point with Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs Miller but you can see Cimino going full David Lean with the mountains of extras, choreographed sequences and large scale set design. It was also a shoot where animals were mistreated and killed, causing controversy and stricter Hollywood guidelines (on that regard, Cimino deserves the film’s failure). The story is based on the Johnson County War where cattle companies paid hired guns to kill the settlers in Wyoming, European immigrants and poor people living on the land, occasionally stealing cows for hunger. “It doesn’t pay to be poor these days,” as one character says. Kris Kristofferson is the marshal who tries to defend the immigrant community, Christopher Walken is a gunslinger working for The Association, and Isabelle Huppert as the brothel madam they both love. Stacked with great actors (Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Brad Dourif, Mickey Rourke, etc) and shot by Vilmos Zsigmond with at times, a dusty, sepia palette, I thought it was good if unwieldy and overwhelming, moving between pessimistic realism and lyrical romanticism.
VHS Tracking 