Heaven's Gate (1980)

I waited 38 years to watch this, all because of the horrible reviews. bad press and the general disdain that the Hollywood King-Makers had for it. I watched the shortened version and and in my opinion it is a masterpiece of Western Film making. (except Sam Waterson, he's laughable in this). Our ancestors, the immigrants in this film, faced unbelievable hardships and yet they prevailed. Their lives are portrayed with accuracy, compassion, laughter and great, great sadness. A case of the "man" keeping the people down. If you are able, please watch this movie. It is worth it!

Magnificent production but pacing and acting are sometimes questionable. I loved the lighting and sets and recreation of 1890's Wyoming but the basic story of the two guys in love with the same girl is Paint Your Wagon without the gold or the songs! And that triangle took up too much time. The story (for it hardly has a plot) is too slight for such a lengthy movie. Sam Waterson is lost for a great chunk of it. And I cannot make out John Hurt's role. Also, it isn't based on any historical events which for me detracted from its appeal. Apparently there was no confrontation between immigrants and "stockgrowers."

I take it that the standard review is something along the lines of just calling it a well photographed flop, which perhaps it was. I recall one reviewer who was terribly upset about the subtitles in a few of the scenes, but this is the fate of subtitles which are widely used in this world to give foreigners magical access to speech in other languages. In China the written language is nearly independent of how it is spoken so while they all speak differently they all write the same thing, more or less. So I am a great fan of subtitles. I once watched a film I had seen before and was quite surprised to see the subtitles. I had remembered what people said quite forgotten having to read those words. What interested me much more was a recurrent motif of people circling around in a ring with multiple rings having some go clockwise and some counterclockwise. We first see this in a grand ball around a tree. We see it again in a dance in Wyoming We see it finally in the various groups of gun fighters and cavalry circling one way or another around the rapidly diminishing feuding groups. I'm not sure what this all means but it is one of the main motifs in the film. I have not read through all of the other critiques so I apologize if this is redundant. I have not noticed it mentioned before.

I agree with Jack Landman. Twenty years ago I saw a butchered version of Heaven's Gate on a 23 inch TV screen. In retrospect, it was pointless. Despite being a film buff I don't remember if the film was shown on the big screens here in Blighty. Finally, thirty-seven years after its release, I've seen the 217 minutes version on Blu-Ray on a 56 inch Cinemascope TV screen with digital sound. It's a magnificent achievement and I salute the late Cimino for having the guts and persistence to hold out for his personal vision and artistic creation.I'm not sure where to begin. Yes, there are longeurs, in the roller-skating scenes, for example, and yes, some dialogue is difficult to pick up. Nevertheless, the set design, acting, particularly by Kristofferson, Huppert and Walken, and landscape photography by Vilmos Zsigmond and Cimino's directing are flawless. The film is beautiful, moving, disturbing and sometimes exciting. Cimino makes us care about his characters and shows us something of what frontier life must have been like in the final years of the 19th century. There's a backbone of fact in the grim events of the Johnson County War that makes a reading of contemporary historical accounts essential.Heaven's Gate is all a great film should be. It has the sweep of David Lean and touches of Sam Peckinpah in the final battle scenes. They rank with those at the end of The Wild Bunch. Praise doesn't come much higher than that!