Stream On: is ‘Heaven’s Gate’ one of the worst—or best—movies ever?
The 2012 Criterion Collection cut of Michael Cimino’s 1980 box-office bomb is actually quite binge-worthy!
Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, made after his five-academy-award-winning The Deer Hunter, didn’t fare so well. It earned only $3.5 million against its $44 million budget and was roasted by critics. It was condemned as one of the worst films ever made—a precipitous fall.
In 2012, after several reworkings, MGM released another cut, digitally restored and 216 minutes long. It premiered at the 2012 Venice Film Festival as part of the Venice Classics series. Cimino explains on the DVD that this is his preferred version of the film, the film he intended to make.
HEAVEN’S GATE | 2012 ‘Criterion’ edition
/Streaming /Amazon /😎57%😌54% /Criterion Trailer /1980 /R
The Deer Hunter is one of my favorite movies, and I meant to see Heaven’s Gate when it came out, but the early reviews were so unanimously negative that I never did. Not the original theatrical cut nor any of the versions that led up to the 2012 version, about which I learned only while researching this column.
Vilmos Zsigmond was the cinematographer, as he was on The Deer Hunter, and his work on Heaven’s Gate (I’m writing about the 2012 cut) is mind-boggling. Most of the wide-angle frames could easily be Thomas Eakins or James McNeill Whistler paintings, or Currier & Ives prints.
A few tropes seem to be borrowed from The Deer Hunter: the elaborate 1870 Harvard graduation scenes are comparable to Hunter’s opening Orthodox wedding scene, followed by a time jump to the present (1892 in Heaven’s Gate), where two of the leads, Harvard men and best friends Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) and dipsomaniac class orator William C. Irvine (John Hurt, Crime and Punishment), are reunited, in what becomes a combat situation, the combat being the historical Johnson County War. (Many of the characters are named for historical figures, but their stories here are pure fiction.)
Another Deer Hunter trope is a love triangle; here, Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert), a Johnson County bordello madam from Quebec, is infatuated with both Averill and his friend Nate Champion (scene-stealer Christopher Walken, The Deer Hunter, The Anderson Tapes, et al.). Averill and Champion both reciprocate her feelings.
Champion is an enforcer for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, who suspect new immigrants from Europe of stealing their cattle for food. The Association has worked up a list of 125 immigrants for assassination, sanctioned by the federal government, and—it’s claimed—President Harrison, who was told that the immigrants were staging an insurrection. (This is historical, although the actual list contained “only” 70 names. In the film, as in history, 52 armed men ride a private, secret train north from Cheyenne. Just outside Casper, Wyoming, they switch to horseback and continue north toward Buffalo, the Johnson County seat. The Johnson County War has been called “the most notorious event in the history of Wyoming.”)
Federal Marshall Averill, when he hears about the letter from his friend Irvine, now a reluctant but philosophical stockman, is opposed to the operation, thinking it extralegal. And Averill and Champion’s love interest, madame Ella Watson, is on the list, too, as she accepts stolen cattle in payment for use of her prostitutes.
The title of the film comes from a giant roller skating rink called “Heaven's Gate,” built by local entrepreneur John L. Bridges (Jeff Bridges, The Old Man, Hell or High Water). It provides a dancing/party scene comparable to The Deer Hunter’s wedding reception, and a venue in which the immigrants gather to arrange an opposition to the Stock Growers.
The streaming and Rotten Tomatoes links don’t specify which version of Heaven’s Gate they’re regarding; the Criterion cut is around 216 minutes long and begins with a Criterion logo. All of the previous versions have a sepia tint that was removed in the 2012 cut. The TubiTV, PlutoTV and Amazon Prime versions are the 1981 director’s second edit of 149 minutes, which opens with an MGM logo followed by four minutes of music against a black screen, before showing a United Artists logo and the opening credits.
The Criterion cut of Heaven’s Gate is, to me, yes, quite fine: beautiful and brutal—a fitting followup to The Deer Hunter. It also reminds me, in execution, of Deadwood and The Assassination of Jesse James. And now I’ve started watching TubiTV’s (free with ads) director’s second edit—which is not bad at all. Not sure what was going on in 1980 with those critics…
Sources include WyoHistory.org; AFI.com; and Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED).
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.