Giving it the Gate
Westerbeck, Colin L Jr.
Screen GIVING IT THE GATE CIMINO'S 'HEAVEN' BITES THE DUST NOTHING THAT'S IN Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate is as revealing as something he has said about it: "When we were finishing the battle...
...he said,' 'you feel at one.'' I wonder how his cast and crew felt working in an atmosphere he had polluted with smoke and dust so badly that those out of camera range wore surgical masks to keep from gagging...
...and I think that in order to deal with places like that one needs a certain amount of communion with that spirit...
...Again Zsigmond pre-flashed the film and got the color to take on that washed-out quality of old, handtinted photographs...
...I don't think you can do without it...
...Well, I don't think such a thing is accidental...
...With the actors' lines drowned out by the clatter of the wagons and horses, and their actions engulfed in dust and smoke, the film literally obliterates itself from the screen...
...Certainly the American Indians believed that there is a spirit in all things...
...In Heaven's Gate he has taken that fall, a pratfall which, in the true spirit of tragedy, may bring down his whole tribe with him...
...If Heaven's Gate doesn't bankrupt Hollywood, or at least United Artists, which also began this bad string by backing Apocalypse Now, the film will most certainly bring to an end the independence these young directors have enjoyed...
...He had the paved streets of the towns he used as locations buried under hundreds of tons of Fullers earth, and had hundreds of tons more dumped on the prairie in order that each passing horse would raise a veritable dust storm...
...But if you lift not only the look but the personnel from another Western made less than a decade ago, you're only being derivative...
...If you borrow an idea from a Western made thirty-five years ago, as Cimino did in a roller-skating scene clearly inspired by the church dance in John Ford's My Darling Clementine, you are being influenced by the masters...
...One reason Heaven's Gate isn't going to be very popular no matter how brilliantly edited the re-release may be is that audiences are still going to feel the best moments in the film are ones they've seen before, recently...
...The theology Cimino is espousing might be better suited to a biblical epic which permitted him to identify with God or, at the very least, Moses...
...They are unadulterated hubris, the kind of talk of which tragedies are made, the bluster of a man who's riding for a fall...
...Heaven's Gate allegedly deals with a true episode in the history of the West, the Johnson-County range war between cattlemen and homesteaders, which has already been the subject of a half dozen movies more lucid, modest, and engaging than this one...
...If you are in a healthy place where the air is wonderful, clean, and clear...
...So he faithfully re-created these conditions in every shot in his film...
...You can hardly imagine the difficulty, and expense, of matching the shots in scenes filmed under these conditions, getting the density of the smoke or dust and the intensity of the light to be the same from one set-up to the next...
...In addition, he had all daytime interiors filmed backlit with real or artificial sunshine pouring through windows into shadowy, smoke-filled rooms...
...And for every shot, he insisted on anywhere from a few to fifty re-takes to make sure he had gotten what he wanted...
...In each case a young director who had scored a great success, as Cimino did with The Deer Hunter, was given a $30-million plus budget and carte blanche...
...it was the very last day and the very last shot and, as Kris [Kristofferson] was walking away, I felt that we needed wind to blow across the battlefield...
...The last shot before the intermission is of John Hurt sitting on his horse as a cloud of smoke vented from a locomotive passes over him...
...When the smoke clears, he has ridden off somewhere, disappeared...
...His remarks are revealing, however, not for their biblical qualities or their Indian lore so much as their classical Greek flavor...
...In Cimino's version, Kris Kristofferson and John Hurt play Harvard classmates who are on opposite sides in the war...
...The only difference this time was that the smokiness and haziness Altman's film evoked weren't created cheaply by use of lens filters...
...The actors, of course, just had to rough it...
...That kind of film, rather than a Western, is what he has tried to make anyway...
...Another stylization Cimino has lifted from Altman is inaudible dialogue...
...Cimino is a little confused, for the Indians believed only that man must act in concert with nature, not that he can have it at his command...
...The film has now been pulled from distribution altogether to be edited down from its three-and-a-half hour running time to a standard feature which may, or may not, be re-released at a later date...
...19 December 1980: 725...
...Miller, the look Cimino wanted for Heaven's Gate...
...With a virtually unlimited budget at his disposal, Cimino became so preoccupied with the details of the mise en scene that he lost all track of his script...
...In the same interview where he congratulated himself for being in tune with the spirit gods of nature, Cimino also waxed poetic about how pure the environment was in Montana where Heaven's Gate was filmed...
...It's as if he had set out to prove that substance is in inverse proportion to money...
...His one Commonweal: 724 idea about the history of the West is that interiors were always smoky and poorly ventilated and the great outdoors was always choked with dust...
...The intermission which follows gives the same opportunity to the audience...
...And in each case the result has been an aesthetic and financial disaster—Apocalypse Now, 1941, The Blues Brothers, and Heaven's Gate...
...This makes Heaven's Gate the last and most spectacular in a succession of big-budget failures that have plagued Hollywood for the last eighteen months...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...The opening of Heaven's Gate in New York was such a catastrophe that the Los Angeles opening and a gala premiere planned for Toronto were both canceled...
...Screen GIVING IT THE GATE CIMINO'S 'HEAVEN' BITES THE DUST NOTHING THAT'S IN Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate is as revealing as something he has said about it: "When we were finishing the battle sequence...
...The other reason the film will never recoup its cost is that beyond its atmospheres, there's nothing to it—no characters in whom we might take an interest, no sense of American history, no plot or story we can follow and get involved in...
...Cimino solved this problem by hiring as his director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond, who years ago created for another film, Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs...
...But where Kristofferson gets his money and why he has sided with the homesteaders, who ate mostly Russian immigrants left over from The Deer Hunter, are never revealed to us...
...Nor do we ever quite fathom Kristofferson's friendly rivalry with one of the cattlemen's regulators (Christopher Walken) for the hand of the local prostitute (Isabelle Huppert...
...We had made no provisions for wind, but somehow I kind of raised my hand (in a gesture of need more than anything) and the wind came up, and I raised it again and it came up harder...
...The expense of Cimino's film notwithstanding, it still looks and feels so close to Altman's that it might be thought derivative...
...All that Cimino has created out of the $36 million Heaven's Gate cost is a little atmospherics...
Vol. 107 • December 1980 • No. 23
