Derek Malcolm recommends: Heaven's Gate

Dividing opinion since 1980, this flawed and self-important film is nonetheless notable for its sheer crazy ambition
derek malcolm recommends
2 August 2013

Few films have been more denigrated or more lavishly praised than Heaven’s Gate. Made in 1980 at inordinate expense and length, Michael Cimino’s western tanked at the box office. It cost $44 million and earned around $1 million.

“This is one of the ugliest films I have ever seen,” wrote the late Roger Ebert.

“The film is remarkable... for Vilmos Zsigmond’s superb Scope camerawork,” says British critic Geoff Andrews in the programme notes at the BFI Southbank, where the film is being given an extended re-release.

To sit uncomfortably on the fence about Heaven’s Gate would seem an impossibility, or maybe just cowardice. But that is what I propose to do.

As far as the film’s cinematography is concerned, I would willingly concede that Andrews is right and Ebert wrong, even though there are several scenes, as Ebert says, where dust, fog, soft focus and sepia tones almost obscure the characters. This roughing up of the Wild West of the 1880s was surely deliberate and is often highly effective.

For his story of the Johnson County wars (cattle barons versus immigrants) Cimino created some stunning set-pieces, such as the mass waltz on Harvard’s lawn. The acting, from a cast that included Kris Kristofferson, John Hurt, Isabelle Huppert and Jeff Bridges, is also as good as Cimino’s rather callow script allows.

But at 220 minutes, which is the uncut version now re-released and not the one Cimino hastily cut after the initial opening, the film meanders along like an essay in self-importance that can’t bear to reach a concluding paragraph.

A classic? No. But the film stays in our memories because of its sheer, sometimes crazy, ambition — to make an art movie that would appeal to the masses. Unfortunately it didn’t. They seldom do.

Heaven’s Gate (1980, cert 15, 220 mins) is at BFI, SE1 tonight until August 15.

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