Heaven's Gate is both a tragic and cautionary tale. The follow-up film to the Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino set out to make the greatest western ever made. Through well-intentioned, but ultimately crushing artistic hubris, Cimino would make one of the most beautiful, criminally underrated film of the last century. A film that would literally bankrupt a film studio (United Artists).
The story is actually fairly simple. A lawman born into wealth attempts to stop Wyoming cattle barons from murdering immigrant families encroaching on their land and stealing their cattle. It is based on the true events of the Johnson County War, a set of events in April 1892 that saw a group of armed thugs and a sheriff's posse that led to a protracted gun battle that forced the intervention of the US cavalry under orders from President Benjamin Harrison. The movie goes further saying saying that the lawless actions of the cattlemen were sanctioned, at least tacitly, by both the Governor of Wyoming and the President of the US.
The movie is, like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way, except...that it is LOOOONG, clocking in at 216 minutes, basically 3.5 hours. Now, I actually didn't have a problem with this. The length is the only criticism I have of it, because there are scenes that could use trimming, even a lot of trimming. But the movie is so beautiful with gorgeous vistas, beautifully framed and lit shots, great choreography and scoring, and a fascinating story. This is one of those movies, like Cleopatra and John Carter From Mars, that are actually pretty good but suffered from toxic pre-release press that stuck onto them forever, creating an unfair shackle they could never shake. All three of these movies have been very underrated as a result and all deserve a second chance.
Now, as I said, it is a cautionary tale as well. The sad tragedy of all this is that everyone got into it with good intentions. United Artists was known to be one of the most friendly studios in Hollywood to artists. Indeed, it had been formed by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, D.W. Griffith and Mary Pickford precisely for that reason, to be an alternative to studios that were stifling creativity in artists under the old studio system. UA essentially gave Cimino a blank check to create another Deer Hunter, to give the newly installed heads of the studio some artistic cred. Cimino's girlfriend was his producer, so she did not rein in his overspending. He also knew how to play the game, telling the studios what they wanted to hear but not changing anything. He overspent his initial budget by well over 300% at $44,000,000 (approx $128,000,000 in today's dollars).
The movie was savaged by bad press stories from hostile reporters who weren't allowed on set until one got hired on as an extra. He wrote a savage piece of a set out of control that delighted the press who immediately picked up the story everywhere. When the initial 219-minute cut was released for the premiere, Vincent Canby of The New York Times eviscerated the movie gleefully. After one week, Cimino himself pulled the movie and reedited it to a more manageable 149 minutes. As you can probably imagine, it became an incomprehensible mess, which Canby and other critics smashed it even harder, and after the dust cleared, the movie grossed a paltry $3 million in the domestic box office after only a two week run, which made it the biggest box office bomb until Cutthroat Island. It now stands as the 10th worst box office bomb when adjusted for inflation (the others, in order at the time of this writing are: The 13th Warrior, The 47 Ronin, Cutthroat Island, Mars Needs Moms, Final Fantasy: The Spirts Within, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Sahara, and The Lone Ranger (2013) in case you were wondering).
The the tragedy was it ended the careers for Cimino and it's star Kris Kristofferson. They made other movies, of course, but the stink of failure, the one truly unforgivable sin in Hollywood, never really left them. All of which is unjustified. Everything in this movie works, except for length, and should be reconsidered. The other lasting legacy of the film is that all film companies have a producer on set to be "the enemy" to the creative people. Through one man's hubris, he ruined for everyone else to come, and that is the warning.
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