Movies

...Heaven's Gate, the film's press kit informs us, is "based on a true incident in American history," the Johnson County War of 1892, a conflict between cattlemen and homesteaders in Johnson County, Wyoming...

...One uses history in a very free way...

...The clear suggestion in Cimino's film is that without a superhero—Averill—to lead them, the hapless settlers, despite their superior numbers, would be no match for the invaders...

...After all, you're not trying to rewrite or reinvent it...

...This depressing coda does not make it into Cimino's film...

...Because of prolonged Federal custody of the invaders, a court-ordered change of venue, the mysterious disappearance of witnesses, and the inability to seat a jury, none of the true insur-reactionists was ever brought to trial...

...An invading force of Stock Growers and their hired mercenaries enters Johnson County...

...There is nothing wrong, in itself, with imaginative historical re-creation, or with the embellishment of known historical fact...

...It was released again this spring after considerable re-editing, supervised by writer-director Michael Cimino, who reduced the film from three hours and thirty-nine minutes to two hours and twenty-eight minutes...

...Tolstoy and Stendhal by no means limited themselves to scholarly documented fact in their accounts of Napoleon's invasion of Russia and the Battle of Waterloo...

...Cimino created something of a scandal by using history "in a very free way" in his previous film—The Deer Hunter...

...They are the scions of the "best" American families, imbued with idealism and notions of service to their country...

...Given a wagonful of captured dynamite, even those who have not gone to Harvard can figure out how to blow up a besieged enemy...

...Among the most significant of these are Cimino's lack of interest in the workings of history, and flagrant disregard for historical fact...

...William Irvine was not a humanist, appalled by the Association's genoci-dal greed—as he is presented in an early scene—but one of the prime instigators of the Johnson County invasion...

...What would be of interest, Cimino seems to believe, is a story of heroism and romance, bathed in the atmosphere of late Nineteenth Century frontier life...

...The liberties which he takes in his current work are no less extravagant...

...The Association's hit list did not contain 125 names, but seventy...

...On the night of April 12, 1892, after learning of the invaders' distress, Governor Amos Barber dispatched urgent telegrams to Wyoming's Senators in Washington, and another to the President declaring that "an insurrection exists in Johnson County, in the State of Wyoming, in the immediate vicinity of Fort Kenney, against the government of said state...

...Averill, now a Federal marshal, learns from his old pal Billy, now a cattle baron and a pathetic drunk, that the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, led by villainous Frank Canton (Sam Water-ston), plans to invade Johnson County and murder a good part of its population...

...He chooses the latter and makes his choice known...

...Neither she nor Averill was involved in the final conflict of the Johnson County War, as they had both been lynched by Association members in the summer of 1889, three years earlier...

...In the case of Heaven's Gate, however, Cimino's historical deformations tend to obscure and diminish the story of what really went on in the Johnson County War...

...Just as the immigrants are about to overrun the invaders' position, a National Guard regiment ordered up by the Governor arrives, and places the remaining invaders under protective custody...

...The immigrant population of Sweetwater, after much hesitation—the mayor and his shopkeeper cronies want to deliver up those whose names figure on the death list— decides to resist the invaders and takes to arms...

...This is, of course, the sort of anti-populist mythology consistently propagated by Hollywood...

...Cut to the Wyoming range, more than twenty years later...

...Averill came to Wyoming from Texas, he never went to Harvard, and he never knew William C. Irvine...

...An uncanny shot from Ella's revolver, however, goes right through the temple of a drunken, bewildered Billy Irvine...

...And Averill was not a Federal marshal, but a free-spirited former soldier who had set up a "road ranch" along the Sweetwater—where he became a postmaster and sold whiskey, groceries, and other supplies...

...Although there were witnesses to the crime (popularly known as "the murder on the Sweetwater"), no one was ever brought to trial...

...He had incurred the wrath of neighboring cattle barons by staking a claim on land which they did not own but used for grazing, and by having the temerity to publish a letter in the Casper Weekly Mail condemning "the range hogs who by threats of bodily harm and other forms of intimidation are preventing settlers from locating along the Sweetwater...

...I'm telling a story that interests me and hopefully will interest other people...

...What is its significance in American history...

...Many friends and good citizens are involved," Senator Warren's private secretary noted, thus revealing the real reasons for governmental concern...

...These are, apparently, the vile rustlers marked for death...

...By the time shooting on it began, however, Heaven's Gate was already so incoherently conceived and had made so many concessions to what Hollywood geniuses consider commercial necessity, that no miracles in the cutting room could entirely overcome its built-in failings...

...The middle of the film is largely taken up with a triangular love story, the focus of which is Ella Watson (Isa-belle Huppert), the fetching French madame of a rural whorehouse, who is loved by both Averill and Nate Champion, a detective for the Association...

...This is no doubt what he means by "using [history] as a context...

...The fact of the matter is that Johnson County settlers were one tough bunch of dudes, quite capable of taking care of themselves and of generating their owner leaders...

...Its photography (by Vilmos Zsigmond) is stunning, and it contains some wonderfully directed set pieces (a Nineteenth Century college graduation, frontiersmen and women cavorting about the Heaven's Gate roller skating rink...

...Every article of clothing, every structure, every sign," he told a reporter, "is based on a photograph of the period...

...This is the film's big action sequence, and it is quite spectacularly photographed and edited...

...The real historical ingredients upon which he based his film are quite fascinating, and the movie cliches which he substitutes for them most certainly are not...

...Nathan D. Champion was not a detective for the Association, but a cowboy who sided with the independent cattlemen of Johnson County...

...As the last epic range war," historian Lewis L. Gould has written, "the Johnson County conflict has received much attention from historians...

...Despite Cimino's wholesale abuse of historical fact, he has managed to acquire a reputation as a stickler for authenticity...

...The inhabitants of Buffalo (not Sweetwater), the county seat of Johnson County, never timorously debated the issue, as depicted in the film, but immediately took to arms as soon as they heard of the murder of Champion...

...Short of redoing the $35 million production from scratch, Cimino has probably done just about everything possible—given the material at hand—to salvage this work...

...The important question is the use to which imagined historical material is put...

...You're using it as a context...

...We are dealt, instead, the disillusioned Averill alone on his yacht, left with only his money and his memories...

...It has been tightened up dramatically and made a bit more coherent, and while it is still not a satisfying movie, it is by no means the worst of this year's offerings...

...He even set up classes for actors and extras in such arcane skills as bullwhipping, wagon driving, and roller skating, and had Isa-belle Huppert, in preparation for her role, spend three days in a bordello in Wallace, Idaho...

...Cut to Johnson County, and a seedy hotel bar full of jabbering East European immigrants, who look as if they just got off the boat at Ellis Island...

...They don't look as though they'd have the vaguest idea what to do with a gun, but fortunately the high-minded, highly skilled, and impeccably dressed Averill is on their side...

...The settlers killed as "rustlers" by agents of the Association were not East European immigrants, but American citizens with such names as Tom Waggoner, Orley E. ("Ranger") Jones, and J. A. Tisdale...

...It was not my intention to write a Michael H. Seitz teaches film at Rutgers University and reviews films regularly for The Progressive...

...The answers to these questions would almost certainly provide material for one hell of a good story...

...The specific facts of that incident recounted in a literal way would be of no interest...

...They lay siege to Champion's cabin, and he and two companions are killed...

...As the attack proceeds, the carnage on both sides is terrible...

...At its most effective it serves to illuminate the working of historical forces, or to penetrate a mass of diverse historical facts and palpably re-create the substance of past human experience...

...Yet in one detail after another the story depicted in Heaven's Gate distorts the historical record...

...historical book," Cimino has said...

...The notion of storming the ranch with a mobile siege machine was not the invention of Averill, who was dead, but of two rather more ordinary citizens: Rap Brown, the manager of the Buffalo flour mill, and Eli Snider, a pioneer-rancher...

...This is not, then, an obscure footnote to American history...

...What was the Johnson County war all about...

...The siege is represented in Cimino's film as a terrible orgy of blood and death, in which so many people on both sides are shot and killed that it is impossible to keep count...

...The invaders, hearing that a force of several hundred armed and enraged attackers was coming after them, fortified themselves in a nearby ranch, and sent a desperate note for help to the Governor...

...His immigrants seem to come into the picture out of some other film (part Bernardo Bertolucci, part Terrence Malick), his love triangle is in no way related to the film's social background, and his spectacular set pieces seek to captivate the viewer, rather than encouraging one to think about the meaning of this singular historical event...

...And, significantly, the invaders were not saved by the National Guard (the local unit would have sided with the Johnson County residents), but by a regiment of U.S...

...Heaven's Gate was released in New York last November, and promptly withdrawn from exhibition after disastrous reviews...

...Epilogue: Some years later a solitary Averill, aboard his ocean-going yacht off the coast of Newport, recalls the murder of Ella at the hands of Association gunmen, just as the two of them were preparing to get married...

...But he is wrong...

...The President promptly issued the necessary orders...

...Champion must choose between allegiance to his employers and the woman he loves...

...His assumption that movie goers would have no interest in the real stuff of history has led him to make a film which is remarkably shallow and lacks credibility...

...A hit list of 125 people the Association considers rustlers, or at least undesirables, has been drawn up...

...They surround the invaders in a clearing, riding around them in circles like the Sioux at Little Big Horn, getting themselves killed by the superior Association marksmen...

...When Ella's name is discovered on the Association's death list...

...Senators Carey and Warren promptly called on the President, requesting immediate Federal aid...

...A prologue introduces James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) and Billy Irvine (John Hurt) at a Harvard graduation circa 1870...

...Does Cimino feel that a conspiracy to murder a mere seventy people is not sufficiently impressive...

...Ella Watson did not run a bordello, she was not French, and there is no record that she ever knew Nate Champion...

...And they were not forced into rustling to feed their starving families, but were engaged in a bitter struggle with the Stock Growers Association over the right of independents to use the open range, maintain a brand, and participate in the roundup...

...The Stock Growers Association, it seems, is the law in Wyoming...

...They might even make a good movie...

...But Cimino's spurious authenticity is limited to outer appearances—to representing a physical illusion of reality, rather than its spirit or essence...

...In fact, the two-day siege ended with no killings on either side (unless one counts unintentional suicides: Two Texas mercenaries dropped their loaded guns, wounding themselves in the knee and thigh, and died a few days later of blood poisoning...

...Averill comes to the rescue and, recalling his Roman history at Harvard, designs mobile siege machines behind which the immigrants, hurling sticks of dynamite, can move in on the invaders...

...Cavalry, placed at the disposal of the Wyoming Governor by direct order of President Benjamin Harrison...

...Frank M. Canton was not a leader of the Association but the Association's star detective, a man who had murdered from eight to ten men for pay...