# On View: How the West Was Won **URL:** **By** David Brudnoy **Published:** February 1, 1981 --- “Enough will be written by others on the gremlins that must have crawled into Michael Cimino’s brain, to lead him so sadly astray.” What do you say of a broken movie? That maybe it can be neatly glued back together again, or trimmed and rewired, or rethought? _Heaven’s Gate_ cost something on the order of $35 million to make, and it consumed ten years, on and off, of Michael Cimino’s life, including several script approaches, several fruitless trips to the Hollywood giants to seek funding and backing, and finally well over a year of shooting and editing, slicing a 5½ hour film this summer to the 3 hours and 45 minutes of film that opened one day in New York City—advance reservations only — and closed the next. I write this the day after _Heaven’s Gate_ appeared first on screen, the day that brought forth the first of what will undoubtedly be dozens of “official” versions of the incredible story of a presumed masterpiece that flopped so badly, that was shredded by the first critical reviews, and that has now been withdrawn at the request of Mr. Cimino (and surely with the anguished assent of United Artists). The director, whose 1978 film, _The Deer Hunter_, earned him and several of its contributors Oscars, is reportedly planning to “rework” the film; he is said, in the first news releases today, to have regretted allowing his film to be “prematurely” released, in order to be eligible for consideration by the Academy for 1980 Oscars. (The Academy rules specify that a film must be commercially released in New York and Los Angeles before the end of the year for which it will be entered into Oscar competition. The end of the year is the 31st of December, rumor has it; I write this on the 20th of November.) We can count on seeing a succession of other stories in coming months, and hearing a variety of charges and counter-charges, as this mighty and near-endless cinema catastrophe hovers between ignominious death and a chance at rebirth. _Heaven’s Gate_, as I and a few hundred other people saw it, will undoubtedly never be seen by an audience again, except possibly, a decade from now, by an audience of film students subjected by their instructors to a sado-masochistic experience in the cinema of elephantiasis, or what the curriculum will probably call: Film 101B, Variations on a Theme of Endless Editing. But unless we are to assume that Michael Cimino, a man of enormous talent, ego, energy, and resourcefulness, will contentedly watch his gargantuan, gorgeous project sink without a trace, we must assume that audiences will see some incarnation of _Heaven’s Gate_. What Vincent Canby of _The New York Times_ calls “an unqualified disaster” is in fact a qualified disaster, if there is such a beast; it is a movie of awesome beauty and stupefying dullness, a film coupling rare bits of tremendous acting with long, _long_ stretches of horrible acting, a film that is at once among the loveliest ever filmed—Vilmos Zsigmond, who also photographed _Deer Hunter_, is the artist to praise here— and among the most abysmally assembled. What do you say of a broken movie? Can it be sliced down to manageable size? For there is simply not enough stuff to it to deserve nearly four hours of your time or anybody’s time, without also losing whatever thin and fragile threads of narrative that now, more or less (more less than more), bind it together. Enough will be written by others on the gremlins that must have crawled into Michael Cimino’s brain, to lead him so sadly astray. And as the movie hangs in limbo between the time I write this and the time you read what I’ve written, we can all expect the full _People-Time- Newsweek-American Film- New York-New West_\-et cetera treatment of the story behind the story behind the story. I would rather consider here the movie as I saw it, isolate the ingredients that will, or at least should, be retained in the version that will finally be seen by moviegoers everywhere, and consider also the specific problems that made its premature withdrawal from commercial distribution a wise, perhaps the only wise, course at this time. First, the story. In 1892, near Casper, Wyoming, wealthy cattle owners, evidently with the cooperation of the highest officials of the region, assembled a large gang of mercenaries for the purpose of slaughtering a group of European (largely Eastern European) settlers. As Asa S. Mercer, a contemporary, writes in his _Banditti of the Plains_, “Nothing so cold-blooded, so brutal, so bold, and yet so cowardly was ever recorded in the annals of the world’s history. The crime was so great that the lapse of years will only tend to magnify it in the minds of all readers of Wyoming history. In this case the sins of men will live after them.” A touch of hyperbole, that, but a useful bit of evidence to record the reaction of the less sanguinary citizens of the time. The episode is known in history as the Johnson County War, which is also the name of Cimino’s 1971 screenplay, the first, as I’ve mentioned, of several versions, in all of which the bare outline of the story is fleshed out with considerable imaginative invention. The movie begins at the Harvard commencement ceremony of 1870. As an alumnus of Harvard I found no Harvard in Cimino’s Harvard, but that is not surprising, since Cimino’s Harvard is in fact Oxford. So much for part of the $35 million, though, admittedly, today’s Harvard retains little that could pass for yesterday’s. Be that as it may, after a top-hatted, lark-like parade along the Harvard- Oxford cobblestone lanes to the Harvard-Oxford great hall, the camera trailing one James Averill (Kris Kristof- One of _Heaven’s Gate’s_ big name stars is Kris Kristofferson, who plays Federal marshall James Averill. Isabelle Hubbert is Ella Watson, the woman he loves. ferson), we enter for a ludicrous address by the Reverend Doctor (Joseph Cotten), followed by a complacent address by the class orator (John Hurt), something to the effect of we’re all awfully glad that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West and we wouldn’t dream of changing a thing. Then we dance and dance and dance and dance and dance and dance, and pretty girls glis-ten and pant for their pretty boys— “You’re beautiful,” Averill says to his young lady; “So are you,” says she to him—and then we somehow find ourselves caught up in a little roughhouse, and much, much merriment. If you don’t mind, I’ll discontinue the repetition, henceforth, of words like much, much, and dance and dance and dance; suffice it to say, everything in _Heaven’s Gate_ that is of the remotest interest is repeated and dragged out way beyond what is necessary or useful or welcome. You’ll have to keep this sad fact in mind from now on: Michael Cimino so loved his _Heaven’s Gate_ that he allowed it to become a monster, a very presentable but utterly untamed monster— huge, rambling, wrapped up in its own exquisiteness. Now, the Harvard-Oxford graduation thing behind us, we follow Averill, who has become a Federal marshal (for the film, though not in reality), to Casper, and once in Casper, to the ornate meeting chambers of the Cattle Growers’ Association, with which the whimsical class orator (Hurt) is connected if not wholly involved, from which Averill was long before expelled, and at which one Canton (Sam Waterston) presides as chief villain. We also see the wretched of the Earth, babbling in guttural tongues, lugging their infants and their things on their broken-down wagons out to their wee parcels of land, land they have bought from afar, and to which they come as to Eden. Eden turns out to have little use for these people, who, in the picture as in life, are being set up for the kill. Says Canton: “Let’s not have any last minute sentimentalism about the killing of a few thieves and anarchists.” Indeed, some of the impoverished settlers have stolen beef; none is an anarchist, however, at least not as the movie begins, but the Association is bent on annihilation, and little matters like truth slip away. The tale is poignant. But Cimino is interested, as he was in _The Deer Hunter_, in the sophisticated interplay of fully rounded characters, as well as in some—here, murky but not impossibly dense-philosophical point. And so the retelling of the “plot,” such as it is, grows more difficult. Let me simplify: We have two men in love with the same woman: Averill (Kristofferson), a hired gun named Champion (Christopher Walken, like Waterston sporting a mustache, though on Waterston the facial hair makes the man look like a sixth Marx brother, while on Walken it gives him the look of Goldie Hawn in male drag), and a successful French madam, whose brothel draws both the poor immigrants and the wealthy Marshal Averill. The lovely lady is Isabelle Huppert, who is seen here in her first English-language film, and who told Stephen Harvey in _The New York Times_ (16 November 1980), “My character is very strong and matter-of-fact about things, much more than the men. All of the men in this movie are large and imposing, but broken inside. The heroine is physically more fragile, but a survivor.” Between the men there is a weird rivalry and some unfinished business, among that business the very strong likelihood that Champion is the fellow we see in silhouette blasting a settler with his shotgun. Averill brings Ella a beautiful carriage and horse and urges her to get out while she can —he has learned that the Association has a hit list of 125 names, and hers is on it— but poor, mean Champion just brings her his love. “You think a woman can’t love two men?” Ella asks Averill. Yeah, it’s just awfully inconvenient, he answers. Kristofferson is not the strongest suit in Cimino’s hand, either in the early section of the film where he is a callow schoolboy at Harvard-Oxford, or in the later section where he is a paragon of rectitude and John Wayney stoicism, grizzled in his beard, but stylish, quite stylish, in his duds. There are other characters who are given their turn to wander around the sets (all constructed at enormous cost, but each exquisitely authentic) and pontificate. There is John H. Bridges (Jeff Bridges, no relation), who runs a saloon and sides with the immigrants, whom he waters and puts up in a hotel dormitory that resembles the lesser accommodations at Dachau. Bridges believes that “barbed wire and women are the two greatest civilizing agents in the world.” He seems to have none of either. There is Mr. _Mr. Eggleston (Brad Dourif, left), the conscience of the immigrant community, and John H. Bridges (Jeff Bridges), the saloon keeper who sides with the immigrants, see trouble brewing at the town meeting._ Eggleston (Brad Dourif), who is the conscience of the little immigrant community, and who, when the time comes to fight or run, rallies his people with nice rousing declarations such as this: “They advanced the idea that a poor man has nothing to say in the affairs of this country.” And we mustn’t forget about our class orator, who, though resisting the Association’s decision to wipe out the settlers, goes along for the showdown. He is never without his flask, and he drinks his way through the battle, pulling himself up to his full five foot zilch to inform us, having been called a sonofabitch by the leader of the Association, that “sonofabitch has always been a favorite expression in this country.” It is as if Mr. Cimino, who wrote as well as directed _Heaven’s Gate_, fretted that if he didn’t throw in some bit of low-level profundity every half hour or so we’d never come back from the popcorn stand. I almost didn’t. The most interesting character in the film is Champion; Walken nearly walks away with the picture, a vision of ambition, maudlin lovelornness, and duplicity—oh, yes, and also a kind of late-blooming honor. His motto: “Want? How the hell do I know! Get rich like you. What else am I supposed to want.” Walken’s Nate Champion dies quite messily in the movie, like almost everybody else. The roundup: After we have learned everything anybody could possibly care to learn about the homely lives of our aggrieved peasants—they gather to dance and roller skate to sweet, rich music, at their social hall, Heavens (sic) Gate—and have seen Ella and her girls at work, and Ella from every angle in the buff, and Averill nude from the waist up, and have gotten it perfectly clear in our heads that the Association is up to no good, and have experienced a half-dozen preliminary slayings, we get down to tacks, which is the battle to end all battles, though even that seems to experience an intermission, as Averill goes back to Bridges’s hotel to freshen up. At college our hero paid close attention to his Roman history, and he devises a couple of wheeled engines of destruction with which the good guys surround the bad guys and almost wipe them out, but Canton goes for help, brings the soldiers, rescues his buddies, and then comes back to shoot up most of the remaining members of the cast, save only for one, who is seen a decade later on his yacht, contemplating what he has lost, comforting himself with a different lady, and hearing again the strains of music that for the preceding four hours, give or take a quarter, have been lulling us. Curtain. And curtains, as mentioned, for _Heaven’s Gate #1_, but don’t give up on the project entirely, not yet. Obviously, even the nicest photography you’ve seen since _Days of Heaven_, and this movie has it, won’t save a film if the story is padded beyond endurance. We really do get a lot more out of less exposure that Mr. Cimino thinks we do. Establishing that our hero and a weak namby-pamby buddy of the villain’s graduated from college together adds nothing of substance to what follows, and swell as the Harvard-Oxford section is to see, it can either be truncated drastically or, better, eliminated. The version of this film that you’ll see—perhaps, the Lord willing, _Heaven’s Gate #2_ can start with Averill on his trainride to Casper. And half, or more, of the vignettes of the immigrants’ lives can be excised with no serious loss. Some of that material is attractive, some outstanding: I found the roller-skating and music-making scene enchanting, and some glimpses of the squalid life these people lived, contrasted with the luxury of the establishment, would make the dichotomy clear and would actually heighten the dramatic tension of the film. Simplify, simplify, as the old Transcendentalist said. Listen, Michael, listen. But since much of the movie makes little sense even with the extensive scenes establishing these awkward relationships among the half-dozen major characters, it might be totally incomprehensible as a character study if snipped too liberally. Eureka! Concentrate on the two suitors and the whore as the central “human interest” ingredient, and give much abbreviated attention to Bridges and our silly friend the class orator, and a more impressionistic vision of the immigrants, and you’ll not only shorten the picture, you’ll help settle it. The battle is the strongest section of the film and, as you would expect having seen Mr. Cimino’s way with war in _The Deer Hunter_, it is at times brilliant. One of the baddies sits at a little desk under a tree, ’midst the raging war, toting up — what? I guess he’s crossing off the names of the people on the hit list who have, in fact, been hit. It is priceless (though, of course, it is repeated several times) and it fits well within the fine, lengthy battle. Only once does the film lose its footing in the battle scenes, when for some reason the sound system seems to have lost power. I asked, and it hadn’t; the film just grows very quiet all of a sudden for no good reason and looks like, or rather sounds like, a mistake. The result is a mistake, but it can be corrected easily with a few snips. I feel like a butcher, and an unwanted, unasked butcher at that, suggesting major surgery to a man whose previous film (reviewed here in March 1979) impressed me tremendously. But I want to see _Heaven’s Gate_ succeed, and it has enough strikes against it even if edited and brutally shortened, as suggested. It has Kristofferson, who is dreadful; it has Hurt, who is wasted in his role (and so glorious in _The Elephant Man_ and _Midnight Express_ and so many other things); it has Huppert, who cannot be believed as a madam in a backwater in Wyoming 90 years ago; it has nice but superfluous bits by Joseph Cotten and Jeff Bridges; it has too little of Walken and too little range of expression from the usually wonderful Waterston. Cimino can slice out some of the lesser work by the less crucial characters but what can he do with Kristofferson and Huppert? I should not like to spend the next several months encountering Michael Cimino at the end of his work day; his colleagues and friends will need vast resources of understanding and forgiveness to put up with the anguished man who’ll emerge each day from his cutting room, having performed surgery on his beloved creation. But I think of a line attached to a brochure about the movie—I can’t remember hearing it in the movie, though I may have: What one loves about life are the things that fade. Averill says at one point to Bridges: “There is no such thing as chance, J.B., that’s a young man’s illusion.” The lines dovetail, and they offer something of an opportunity to those, primarily Michael Cimino, who will try to salvage a film from this abortion. Illusions, and delusions, are what _Heaven’s Gate_ is about; the immigrants are constantly bemused, grimly so, about the contrast between the promise of America and the reality of America, the delusions they carried and the illusions that clouded their minds. The wealthy Association members love little except that which does not fade: gold, property, position. They die, so many of them die, because they have come to kill those who have nothing but dreams. Most of the characters upon whom we focus throughout the movie, the “stars,” the bankable names that even Michael Cimino needed to get his financing, die too, their illusions wiped away by the reality of a volley of bullets. When I reviewed _The Deer Hunter_ last year in these pages, I wrote, in full appreciation of Cimino’s masterpiece: “We are shown a nation whose values are at variance with its customs, also whose values are sometimes inescapably perverted by and trapped by those customs, but whose homely values are at all times more worthy than the orchestrated fanaticisms of the government that would so dearly like us to believe that it is one with the people it ruins, depraves, and murders.” Let that stand here, today, as an evaluation, of sorts, of the intention, if not, alas, the realization, of Michael Cimino’s current film. And add to that a phrase from the first spoken bit in _Heaven’s Gate #1_, this from the Reverend Doctor at the commencement ceremony: “The General is not more dependent on the strong arm of the soldier than this country on our hearts and minds.” Do you see? Cimino has a vision, I think it a true vision, of the reality of these United States of America. I think that one really does love most about life that which fades, that which is so fragile, so easily spoiled—honor, decency, kindness, tolerance, joy. _Heaven’s Gate_ would have us understand. This version, this #1, is clouded by too much worshipful fondling of the arty for the sake more of Art than of communication; this version, this #1, jes growed, like Topsy, I guess, unstoppable even by its maker, who could not fashion a plausible creation that would impart his vision to others; this version, this #1, sprawls, and it reaches beyond its grasp, and it falls to pieces over and over again; and yet, this version, this #1, contains the seed of something great, something beautiful, something, even with the wrong man and the wrong woman as its leads, that might, when the many vital changes have been made, help open our eyes to some precious piece of truth, some snippet of wisdom, some insights, that will make us all very glad that, even in Hollywood, there is such a thing as a second chance. LR’s film critic also reviews for WNAC-TV (CBS), WHDH Radio, and _The Boston Herald American_. He hosts “The David Brudnoy Show” on radio and “Nightscene” on television, writes a newspaper column for national distribution, and reviews books for a number of journals. ©Copyright David Brudnoy, 1981.