Who killed Heaven’s Gate and the New Hollywood?
Michael Cimino's derided masterpiece was destroyed by a critical establishment that, in doing so, destroyed itself
Having just finished Charles Elton’s new book Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision about the film director Michael Cimino, I’ve been left with a certain odd mix of sadness and admiration. Sadness for the premature destruction of Cimino’s career and the lonely life he led afterwards, and admiration for the extraordinary artistry with which he worked and that eventually consumed him. But I’ve also been struck by the interesting question of who was really responsible for Cimino’s demise as a filmmaker and, by extension, the destruction of the last great moment in American cinema.
For all the non-cinephiles out there, it’s a relatively simple story: In 1978, a former director of commercials named Michael Cimino conquered Hollywood overnight with The Deer Hunter, a perennial classic about the Vietnam War and its traumatic effects on the working-class men who fought it. The film garnered universal critical raves and multiple Academy Awards, including two for Cimino himself, vaulting him instantly into the cinematic pantheon. In its wake, the studio United Artists granted him literally carte blanche to make his next film, an epic Western called Heaven’s Gate.
What followed has passed into Hollywood legend and cinematic infamy. Cimino’s snail-like pace of shooting caused Heaven’s Gate to exceed its budget by orders of magnitude, eventually costing some $40 million all told (approximately $131 million today). When it was finally finished, critics lambasted the picture, Cimino hastily recut it, and when re-released it made a pittance. Shortly after, UA was sold to a corporate raider and essentially disappeared. Heaven’s Gate was blamed for literally destroying an entire studio, and Cimino became a pariah in Hollywood, mustering only four more films over the decades before he died an abandoned recluse in 2016.
But the disaster of Heaven’s Gate was seen as more than the story of yet another Hollywood flop. Cimino’s film came to be perceived as a watershed: the moment when the “New Hollywood” of the 1970s finally crashed and burned, ushering in the new era of the commercial blockbuster and special effects films that now dominate American cinema, much to its detriment.
Begun by 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde and 1969’s Easy Rider, the New Hollywood of the ‘70s was, essentially, a conscious break with Hollywood’s past. After a long period in which the producer was the dominant force in Hollywood and great directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks often had to fight tooth and nail to preserve their vision, the New Hollywood became the first age of the director since the silent era. Filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Arthur Penn, and numerous others thrived under the new order, pumping out classics like The Godfather, The Last Detail, Taxi Driver, M*A*S*H, The Exorcist, and The Deer Hunter itself. American cinema was revitalized and produced films that were more daring, explicit, and better than any since Hollywood’s last Golden Age in the pre-television 1930s and ‘40s. Above all, the ‘70s gave the director control, the ability and freedom to pursue a singular vision wherever it might lead.
The end of the New Hollywood began in 1975 with the massive success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and was compounded in 1977 by George Lucas’ Star Wars, both of which anticipated the grandiose special effects blockbusters of the future. Most observers and many of the New Hollywood filmmakers themselves, however, point directly to Heaven’s Gate as the moment it all came crashing down. Cimino, it was believed, had pursued his singular vision wherever it might lead, and where it led was disaster. The failure of Heaven’s Gate and the collapse of UA were blamed entirely on Cimino’s egomaniacal self-indulgence, and the director’s cinema of the New Hollywood was instantly seen as a threat to the industry itself. So, the studios cracked down, reinstalled the producer as the dominant force in Hollywood, and brought the artists to heel, ending the Golden Age for good. In doing so, some of us believe, they also destroyed American cinema, to the point that films like the Marvel series are now made more by corporate boards than anything resembling a filmmaker. So, according to this narrative, in a single stroke of hubris and artistic obsession, Cimino burnt down the New Hollywood and with it American cinema.
This was always, of course, an unfair and simplistic version of events. By the time Heaven’s Gate rolled around, Jaws and Star Wars had already proven that the studios could make far more money with simplistic special effects films than with difficult pictures like Altman’s Nashville or Coppola’s The Conversation. At the same time, several other major directors produced serious flops long before Cimino, such as Friedkin’s Sorcerer and Scorsese’s New York, New York. In addition, profligacy was nothing new in Hollywood, dating all the way back to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and all the way forward to James Cameron’s Titanic, with Gone With the Wind and Cleopatra emerging along the way. As Elton himself put it in a recent interview:
All the things that [Cimino’s] accused of, I’m not saying he didn’t do them, but other people did them, too. For example, Darling Lili, that Blake Edwards movie, in 1970, the budget was $20 million, maybe even more. In inflation terms, in 1980, that’s $50 million. It lost a fortune. But Blake Edwards still worked. … So, I was interested in all the things that are said about Cimino, how an untruth becomes a myth becomes a fact.
This begs the question, of course, of why Heaven’s Gate in particular became a byword for Hollywood disaster and directorial hubris.
The most common reason put forward is that it is simply a terrible movie. A terrible movie, moreover, that was ruinously expensive. This was certainly the opinion of the critics, who responded to its New York premiere with a vicious hostility bordering on hysteria. The critical consensus was exemplified by Vincent Canby’s brutal verdict:
Heaven’s Gate fails so completely, you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect. … The grandeur of vision of the Vietnam film has turned pretentious. The feeling for character has vanished and Mr. Cimino’s approach to his subject is so predictable that watching the film is like a forced, four-hour walking tour of one’s own living room. … Heaven’s Gate is something quite rare in movies these days — an unqualified disaster.
The rest of the critical establishment, as is their wont, followed suit, with one critic going so far as to say that there was “nothing” in the film.
Even today, with the film currently undergoing something of a reevaluation, especially in Europe, most American critics remain at least guardedly hostile. In a recent article on the film — largely sympathetic to Cimino — the novelist Bret Easton Ellis wrote, “After I watched it for a third time during lockdown, I think Michael Cimino had convinced himself that he’d created a masterpiece, and that all the expense and hard work and time spent had been worth it. And though there are dozens of images in Heaven’s Gate that are as stunning as any ever shot and there is undeniable genius in it, the movie does not work.”
To judge whether any of this is true, it’s worth considering the film itself, absent the reputation it acquired. There is a lore of Heaven’s Gate, and all lore is inherently suspect. What should we make of this film, which has been so assiduously savaged for four decades, as a film?
Heaven’s Gate tells the highly fictionalized true story of the Johnson County War — a violent dispute between wealthy landowners and poor, mostly Slavic immigrants in 1890s Wyoming. The county sheriff, the Harvard-educated James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) takes the side of the immigrants; his friend Nate Champion (Christopher Walken), a gunfighter in the pay of the landowners, contends with him until finally changing sides, which costs him his life; and both of them vie for the love of local brothel madam Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert). Together, they and the townspeople eventually face down the landowners’ hired mercenaries and their leader, played by a mustache-twirling Sam Waterston, in an epic battle. Throughout, the struggles and small joys of the immigrant community are portrayed in full, and their effort to defend themselves ends in a victory that nonetheless comes at a cost so high that it seems largely futile. Ultimately, Averill repairs back to his life of aristocratic comfort, left only with his haunting memories of the “good gone days.”
Assessed on its own, in a proverbial vacuum, Heaven’s Gate has some straightforward and obvious virtues. For example, as even its many detractors acknowledged, it is one of the most beautifully photographed pictures ever made. Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography is a work of art in and of itself, with vast epic vistas of mountains and meadows contrasted with intimate interiors in which shafts of light illuminate the omnipresent dust and smoke. Throughout, the images have a hazy, diffused, and grainy look that feels like ancient daguerreotypes come to life. Moreover, this is not mere beauty for the sake of beauty. The photography immerses you so fully in the period that one feels as if one has stepped on to an alien planet in which the Earth stopped in the late 19th century.
David Mansfield’s score is also a standout. Composed entirely of adaptations of traditional folk songs played on acoustic instruments, it is intimate, haunting, and fragile, while at the same time evoking the period as strongly as the cinematography. One feels as if this is the music that one would hear from saloons and open windows if one happened to walk down a Johnson County main street. It evokes, moreover, the overall theme of the film, which is a certain wistfulness, a remembrance of passing things and the weight of the accumulation of time, summed up in the picture’s original tagline, “What one loves about life are the things that fade.”
Furthermore, while usually derided, the performances are excellent throughout. Kristofferson betrays his character’s macho exterior with momentary tears and a clear sensitivity that give Averill a depth the stock Western hero lacks. Walken conveys a ruthlessness that is contrasted with his soulful eyes and bashful manner, which in his scenes with Huppert say what he himself cannot say, which is “I love you.” Huppert herself manages to transcend the “hooker with a heart of gold” stereotype by giving Ella a certain brutal practicality that forces her to choose a reliable man she does not love over the romantically indecisive and cowardly man she does. And Waterston, cast brilliantly against type, personifies the rapacious capitalist dedicated to profit above all, who nonetheless believes absolutely in his own moral rectitude and that his atrocities are necessary for good and right to triumph. The supporting performances, especially by Jeff Bridges and John Hurt, are also uniformly excellent, and the colorful cast of immigrants seems to have stepped out of a silent Russian epic onto the plains of Wyoming.
But in the end, the greatest performance in the film is that of Cimino himself. This is perhaps the answer to one critic’s assertion that there was “nothing” in the film. In fact, there is a great deal in Heaven’s Gate. All great films are essentially accumulations of transporting moments, and though it is the job of everybody else to make such moments possible, it is ultimately the director who must create them, and Heaven’s Gate is replete with them:
A group of graduating Harvard men singing their class song about having “hearts strong, bold, and true” as the camera moves in on a group of young girls holding candles, watching from an open window, as the first strains of the score are heard on the soundtrack.
The entrance of Christopher Walken, his shadow slowly falling across a tent flap until he fires a shotgun through it, killing an innocent immigrant.
John Hurt sunken almost to the floor intoning, “I’m a victim of our class.”
A train of new immigrants stretching in a long, weary line across the plains, carrying everything they own in hand-pulled carriages.
Walken’s first scene with Huppert, in which his quiet adoration is eminently apparent even though the two speak almost entirely in banalities.
The much-derided roller-skating scene, a masterpiece of kinetic filmmaking, in which a joyful mass gathering of dancers is then punctuated by a beautiful waltz in solitude between Kristofferson and Huppert, all accompanied by a stormy Cajun band led by Mansfield.
A drunken John Hurt reciting slurred lines of poetry as he disappears into a cloud of white smoke.
Waterston coldly executing an immigrant in a statement of both his evil and his resolve.
Walken’s defiant death in a hail of bullets as his cabin burns behind him.
The aftermath of the final battle, in which Bridges watches with an expression of pure, unfathomable horror as an immigrant woman — traumatized beyond reason by her husband’s death — shoots herself, and a depleted Kristofferson disappears into the unforgiving landscape.
Kristofferson’s silent tears, decades later, as he leaves his decadent wife to her aristocratic slumber on their yacht floating in the Rhode Island sea.
These are only the finest of the moments Cimino conjures up in Heaven’s Gate. In fact, almost every scene contains something incandescent, and due to the slow and deliberate pacing — also much derided — one can sink into Heaven’s Gate, experiencing each of those moments in full. Heaven’s Gate, like Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon or Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, envelops the audience, pulling us into its world as it slowly unfurls.
I freely admit that — as you may have guessed — I love Heaven’s Gate. I think it is probably one of the greatest films ever made, and certainly one of the best Westerns. It may, in fact, be the greatest of the revisionist Westerns, though that title would certainly have to be shared with Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. I believe it is one of the few films that, like Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, Malick’s Tree of Life, or Ford’s The Informer and Stagecoach, can be legitimately called sublime. It is a Ming vase of a film, a self-contained and pure expression of beauty itself. Very few works of cinema ever achieve this, and they are not always the greatest of pictures, but they have something decidedly special, a kind of small perfection, that is not to be taken lightly.
Why, then, did it fail? There is, first, the obvious reason: it is too long and too slow for most audiences. While the situation is far worse today — with our attention spans annihilated by the lightning speed of the internet — even back in 1980, audiences were unwilling to sit for a three-and-a-half-hour film that moves at a glacial pace. Glaciers are, of course, extremely beautiful, but they are not noted for their kinetics. Its epic length and stately rhythm are part of the greatness of Heaven’s Gate, but they also mean that you must come to the film rather than vice-versa. Then and now, this is not something to which audiences will readily consent.
But in the end, the film failed for a very simple reason: the critics hated it, or at least claimed to. The critical establishment at the time wielded far more power than it does today, when most Hollywood movies are largely “critic-proof,” and the fact that the establishment not simply panned the film but denounced it as a travesty of cinema effectively doomed Heaven’s Gate. Nor did Cimino’s panicked decision to withdraw and re-edit the film help matters, given that it was taken as confirmation that the film was indeed terrible. As a result, for years, Heaven’s Gate became synonymous with the proverbial “bad movie,” and was even listed in a book on the supposed worst films ever made.
Why did the critics hate it? There are several possible explanations: first, many of them may have genuinely disliked the movie, though it is unlikely that this would have been enough to cause the hysterically overwrought assault on the picture. The film had garnered a fair amount of negative advance publicity, and the critics no doubt felt honor bound to follow the crowd and savage the picture when they finally saw it. In addition, most American film critics are shameless bandwagon jumpers, and often expend a great deal of ink trying to convince moviegoers that a bad film is great and vice versa should the groupthink decide it is the case. There was, no doubt, the desire to take Cimino down a peg or two, thus demonstrating the critical establishment’s power and establishing its independence from Hollywood hype. There was also some political pressure at work, as The Deer Hunter had been denounced as a racist right-wing screed, and the establishment may have wanted to reestablish its left-wing bona fides, which is ironic, given that Heaven’s Gate is a decidedly left-wing — or at least populist — movie.
Perhaps most of all, however, there is the sad truth that most film critics, then and now, dislike movies. They would much rather be reviewing dance, classical music, low-selling novels, or something equally highbrow. They regard cinema as a lesser medium, and when they encounter a work of cinema that is wholly of cinema, that has nothing to say except itself — such as the later films of Stanley Kubrick — they recoil in horror. Decades later, perhaps, they may pretend that these films were instant classics that they loved all along, but the critical establishment is replete with shameless liars, and we should not take such “reevaluations” as testimony to their integrity and skill.
What is truly tragic is that, in the end, the death of Heaven’s Gate and with it the New Hollywood can be laid squarely upon the critical establishment that now bemoans the death of the New Hollywood. In their spiteful evisceration of a film that could not possibly have been as bad as they claimed it was, they put the nail in the coffin of the director’s cinema, and ensured the rise of the blockbuster. In the end, ironically, these blockbusters become so critic-proof that they destroyed the critical establishment’s own power. It was the critics who put an end to the director’s cinema by destroying a great film and a great director, and in doing so rendered themselves irrelevant. They may well hate what American movies have become, but they have no one to blame but themselves.
What is fortunate, however, for those of us who love movies, is that Heaven’s Gate, at long last, is also emerging as critic proof. Slowly, as mentioned above, it has been reassessed and reevaluated. In Europe, it is increasingly viewed as a misunderstood and unjustly maligned masterpiece, and this view is slowly gaining traction in America as well. The descendants of the critics who murdered the film and with it the New Hollywood are beginning to wonder if Heaven’s Gate was really all that bad, and whether, perhaps, it might even have been great.
For those of us who love it, however, Heaven’s Gate is a simple reminder that the wonderful thing about cinema is that, if properly maintained, film is not a thing that fades. It remains long after the critics have passed into history, so those of us who love the shattered and savaged films can treasure them as among the things we love in life. They remain forever, they belong to us, and they remind us that the good gone days are not gone, and there are no times but new times.
Who killed Heaven’s Gate and the New Hollywood?
You understand Heaven's Gate, Benjamin, and you understand it well. Thank you.
I saw the cut version of HG upon release, at the America Theater in -- Casper, Wyoming -- where I grew up.
Two years earlier I watched Deer Hunter in that very same theater. In 1985 I viewed Year of the Dragon at the America, too.
I own several versions of HG -- on VHS, on a Japanese DVD, and the wonderful Criterion release from 2012. Somewhere my original copy of the soundtrack LP is waiting for me to find it. I also own a press kit of photos and production notes for the film. And, like you, I've recently read Elton's book. You could say I'm a fan.
It is gratifying to see HG appreciated by insightful and accomplished commentators like you. Kudos!
You summed up the qualities and history of this masterpiece perfectly. It is so gratifying to know that this film, that I have almost felt guilty for loving for the last 30 years, is also appreciated by so many others. This was a great article that I enjoyed reading, immensely. Thank you.