Here is a film of great ambition that is hobbled by almost rudimentary failures in storytelling; a film of gorgeous cinematography that captures the rawness of the American West in a way that virtually no other western ever has, yet has a soundtrack that is so bizarrely muddled and unbalanced that some of the most important dialogue is drowned out by background noise; a film with an impressive roster of actors and actresses, almost all of whom feel either miscast or simply lost; and a film that celebrates the rough-hewn humanity of the poor and downtrodden and castigates the wealthy elites as literal cutthroats, yet went tens of millions of dollars overbudget (the final cost was some $44 million) and became the leading example of monetary waste, excess, and hubris in Hollywood.

More than anything, though, Heaven’s Gate marked the end of an era. Produced and distributed by United Artists, the studio founded in 1919 by director D.W. Griffith and actors Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford as a means of escaping the yolk of studio control over their artistry, Heaven’s Gate is in many ways the apex of the kind of bold “New Hollywood” cinema that had taken over in the 1970s, clearing out the last vestiges of the old studio system and infusing it with ambitious young filmmakers and producers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, and Robert Evans who sought to remake Hollywood as a crossroads in which European art cinema and the classical Hollywood titans on which they had been raised fused together into something new, vibrant, and vital. The result was The French Connection (1971), The Godfather (1972), Chinatown (1974), Nashville (1975), Taxi Driver (1976)—a new era of new classics that literally redefined the American cinema on the world stage.

It was in this atmosphere that Cimino rose to prominence, first grabbing attention with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), which starred and was produced by Clint Eastwood, and then solidifying his reputation as a new enfant terrible with his devastating, multi-Oscar-winning Vietnam war drama The Deer Hunter (1978). Although Heaven’s Gate was already in production before Cimino took home the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars, those statuettes helped encourage UA to essentially write him a blank check, thus turning his third film into a litmus test for how far a New Hollywood auteur could take talent and ambition. The combination of Cimino’s uncompromising vision and an almost complete lack of oversight turned out to be toxic, as it resulted in a film that was critically savaged and did so poorly at the box office, even after a massive re-edit that brought it down from 219 minutes to 149 minutes, that it nearly bankrupted United Artists (its parent company, the insurance giant Transamerica, quickly sold it off).

The irony is that, for all its flaws, Heaven’s Gate embodies virtually all of the characteristics otherwise celebrated in ’70s American cinema: an unconventional narrative structure rooted in genre revisionism, progressive politics, and an uncompromising approach to the realities of human violence and failure. The real problem, one could argue, is that Heaven’s Gate was simply too much too late. Had it been released in the wake of Watergate or the thick of Vietnam, it might have been heralded as a bold reassessment of the ideals of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny. Instead, it arrived at the dawn of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” when the country was craving a silver screen full of winners, rather than another bleak downer about shattered ideals and death. The New Hollywood had, for all intents and purposes, come to and end.

Shattered ideals and death are at the heart of Heaven’s Gate, which opens at Harvard College in 1870, where a class of idealistic youths including James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) and Billy Irvine (John Hurt) are graduating. As he did with The Deer Hunter’s lengthy first third, Cimino takes his time in these opening sequences, establishing the youthful optimism of characters we will soon follow into a heart of darkness and the epic nature of the film itself. A beautifully swirling dance on the college grounds to Johann Strauss’s “The Blue Danube Waltz” is a visually captivating metaphor for the openness of life at this point, where everything is possible. With a single cut the story then leaps forward 20 years, where we find Averill is now a stoic, disillusioned federal marshal in Johnson County, Wyoming, and Hurt is a drunken, even more disillusioned but less admirable member of the Stock Growers Association, a powerful lobby of wealthy ranchers bent on taking over the West for their own profit.

The narrative backdrop is a highly fictionalized version of the Johnson County War, a battle between the Stock Growers Association and a group of immigrant farmers and ranchers, most of whom seem to have come from Eastern Europe and left virtually none of their culture behind. The immigrants are struggling to make ends meet, in some cases starving, and as a result some of them have taken to stealing cattle from members of the Association to feed their children. The wealthy ranchers, led by Frank Canton (Sam Waterston), decide to paint the immigrants as anarchists, thieves, and killers and get the government’s support to get rid of them. They draw up a death list of 125 names and pay a recruited mob of killers $5 a day plus $50 for each of the people on the list who are shot or hung.

Averill is determined to protect the immigrant farmers from the Association, of which he was apparently a member before being driven out (the exact reason for this is left tantalizingly vague). Averill’s commitment to the immigrants is also driven by his relationship with Ella (Isabelle Huppert), a local madam who is simultaneously involved with Nate Champion (Christopher Walken), an immigrant-turned-hired killer. Ella believes that she can love two men at once, although she seems more drawn to Averill, who is wealthy, but has not lost his soul to his economic advantage. The romantic triangle and the impending war between the Association and the immigrants converge when Averill learns that Ella’s name is on the death list because she accepts cattle (presumably stolen from members of the Association) in payment for services.

The narrative in Heaven’s Gate is structured around class warfare, and Cimino paints his characters with broad strokes. The members of the Association are unambiguously inhumane, willing to murder if it means more profit. Sam Waterston, usually cast as upright and noble characters (see, particularly, his role a few years later in The Killing Fields), is particularly noxious as Frank Canton, who mills about in a floor-length fur coat and hat while fomenting what can only be called genocide. The immigrants, on the other hand, are depicted as decent and hard-working, albeit rough around the edges and given to such unwholesome activities as cock fighting and brawling. Clearly positioned as the underdogs, Cimino overplays his hand by making them far too interchangeable, a mass of dark clothes and dirty faces spouting various Eastern European languages. He gives us a few faces to humanize the immigrants, including Ella and John L. Bridges (Jeff Bridges), who owns a skating rink and meeting hall where the immigrants converge. Cimino had already displayed a propensity for symbolism (it was how he explained the historically inaccurate use of forced Russian roulette in The Deer Hunter), and Heaven’s Gate is heavy with it, which often weighs down the narrative when it should be propelled forward. Trained in art and architecture, Cimino tends to think in patterns and pairs, such as the earlier waltz at Harvard being reflected in the roller-skating folk dance held by the immigrants, which is nice from an analytical perspective, but doesn’t always translate well in terms of storytelling and pacing.

If Heaven’s Gate doesn’t always work from a narrative perspective, it is consistently impressive in the sheer grandiosity of its visuals. Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond, who had previously shot The Deer Hunter, as well as Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Heaven’s Gate is a film of great visual poetry that features some of the most arresting cinematic compositions I have ever seen. Cimino, ever the perfectionist, scoured the American West looking for the kind of ideal, previously unfilmed locations that would convey the raw beauty and power of the untamed landscape. Already impressive in its own right, the land is brought to lyrical heights by Zsigmond’s cinematography, which employed a highly stylized, yet determinedly realistic aesthetic of heavily diffused golden light that renders the mud, smoke, dust, and blood of the West very nearly ethereal. Cimino and production designer Tambi Larsen’s close attention to detail and historical realism (virtually all of the sets and costumes were based on period photographs) provides a powerful counterpoint to the lighting, suggesting a world in perpetual conflict.

While this approach creates individual images of such intensity and beauty that you want to pull them out of the film and frame them, it also runs the risk of becoming counterproductive, particularly in the climactic shootout between the Association’s posse of killers and the immigrants, which is so shrouded in dust and diffused light that that it becomes almost impossible to determine what is happening at any given moment. The film’s editing is likewise uneven (four editors are credited in the final version), with some scenes, such as the final battle, feeling borderline incompetent, while other moments, such as a hard transition from the loud din of a bustling frontier town to the rarefied silence of the club where the Association members meet, beautifully and meaningfully rendered.

In the end, Heaven’s Gate will always be burdened with its legacy of excess and collapse. All of the revisionist takes on the film are certainly laudable and worthwhile for drawing our attention to the finer points of a film that has for too long been the butt of jokes about Hollywood ego. For his part, Cimino never quite recovered. After having been anointed the next big thing, he was quickly taken down and shunned, an object lesson in the fickle nature of fame and artistic adulation. He has made a number of other films, notably The Year of the Dragon (1985), a controversial crime thriller co-written by Oliver Stone, and The Sicilian (1987), a roundly criticized portrait of the Italian bandit-hero Salvatore Giuliano. In fact, it was in response to The Sicilian that Washington Post critic Hal Hinson wrote a cutting, but incredibly astute description that is also applicable to Heaven’s Gate: “There’s a difference between watching a Volkswagen and a Rolls-Royce go plunging over a cliff, and this is definitely a Rolls. And just as definitely, it goes plunging, all in flames.”

Copyright ©2012 James Kendrick

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All images copyright © The Criterion Collection and United Artists