Director: Michael Cimino
Stars: Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges
6.5/10
Finally got around to seeing this film. It’s well known that it was a box office flop that almost ruined the studio. Fresh from his success with The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino was given free hand to make an epic western about a clash between immigrant homesteaders and cattle barons.
The film opens with a graduation ceremony at Harvard College which the director chose to make at Oxford University. The former has colonial architecture, the latter gothic. Not sure why this was the case. Possibly because Oxford’s buildings suggest upper-crust authority better than Harvard’s.
Kristofferson plays a Harvard alum and member of the upper-crust who for reasons unexplained in the film, becomes a US Marshal in Wyoming. There, he falls in love with a brothel owner (Huppert) who’s under the barons’ guns for accepting stolen cattle in payment. Walken plays a hired gun in the barons’ employ who is also in love with the madame.
There are wonderful scenes of immigrant life that will remind viewers of the wedding scene in The Deer Hunter. Both are well filmed and delightful but rather long for what they convey. Another parallel is that Russian immigrants are prominent in both films. (I think very highly of The Deer Hunter and didn’t mind its long wedding scene.)
The conflict between barons and immigrants leads to a battle. Immigrants encircle the barons’ vigilantes in manner reminiscent of the Indians attacking the wagon train. The engagement ends with the cavalry rescuing the barons et al. Both scenes are of course inversions of scenes in old westerns.
Cimino is unable to make characters interesting or appealing. Almost all the dialog is quite dull. In one scene, Kristofferson’s character says, “You can’t fire me. I quit.” Heaven’s Gate ends with an excellent coda which might be the best scene in the entire 3 1/2-hour film. Kristofferson has left Wyoming and is aboard a yacht off Newport, Rhode Island – the haunt of the eastern elite then. He’s married to a fellow member of the upper-crust, though unhappily.
Copyright 2019 Brian M Downing