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Documentary on the making (and unmaking) of Heaven’s Gate, narrated by Willem Dafoe and featuring interviews with stars Kris Kristofferson, Jeff Bridges, and Brad Dourif; UA exec Steven Bach (author of Final Cut, the book, available at concession starting Oct 8); and others. Digital projection. Approx. 78 min. |
(1980) When the handlebar-mustachioed
fatcats of the Wyoming Cattleman’s Association
send a horde of hired guns, including
Christopher Walken, to drive immigrant
squatters off their land, federal marshal Kris
Kristofferson does his best to avert the
seemingly inevitable My Lai-like massacre —
both men taking time out for visits with Isabelle
Huppert’s frontier prostitute. Following his Deer
Hunter Oscar triumph, wunderkind director
Michael Cimino was handed both a lucrative
contract for his next project — his own heavily fictionalized screenplay
on the historical
Johnson County Wars — and the coveted “final cut,” a clause
the studio would later
regret when the picture went 400% over budget (“Final Cut” is the
bitterly ironic title of
Stephen Bach’s best-selling chronicle of the movie’s making and
of a new documentary
— see below). But when Heaven’s Gate opened in November, 1980,
critics got in line to
deliver brutal body slams. The Times’ Vincent Canby
wrote, “It fails so completely that you
might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his
soul to obtain the success of The
Deer Hunter and the Devil has just
come around to collect.” Withdrawn
after only a week, the film reappeared
four months later shorn of
over an hour. But even post-pressfuror,
the public still stayed away in
droves, and Gate recovered only $11/2 million of its $44
million budget. But was it really as bad as all that?
When the complete version was released in Europe, far
from the anti-Cimino hysteria, some critics praised it as
a masterpiece and made it a cause célèbre. No such reappraisal
has been possible here, until now. This is the
complete 3-hour, 45-minute version that played for that
one week in 1980 — in a new 35mm restoration
(highlighting the gorgeous cinematography by Vilmos
Zsigmond), with its soundtrack in full stereo for the very
first time. “A majestic and lovingly detailed Western
which simultaneously celebrates and undermines the
myth of the American frontier.” – Time Out (London). Approx.
225 min.
AN MGM RELEASE
| Links: | Available at Amazon:
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