What one loves about life are the things that fade.

The only thing greater than their passion for America...was their passion for each other.


A notorious artistic and financial failure, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate was blamed for critically wounding the movie Western and definitively ushering out the 1970s Hollywood New Wave of young, brash, independent filmmakers. Taking a revisionist, post-Vietnam view of American imperialism, Cimino used the historical Johnson County War incident in Wyoming to create an impressionistic tapestry of Western conflict between poor immigrant settlers and rich cattle barons led by Canton (Sam Waterston) and his hired gun Nate Champion (Christopher Walken). Attempting to mediate is idealistic Harvard graduate and county marshal Averill (Kris Kristofferson), who is both Nate's friend and his romantic rival for the affections of Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert). However, war erupts, at great cost to all involved. Flush from his success with the Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter (1978), Cimino demanded creative control, and his insistence on shooting on location and building historically accurate sets and props multiplied the film's original budget to a then-astronomical $36 million. When United Artists premiered the original 219-minute version (sight unseen), they discovered that Cimino had produced an elliptical epic, compounding the box-office difficulties of making a Western without any major stars. Critics howled about Cimino's incomprehensible self-indulgence, and United Artists pulled the film after several days. Re-released five months later, 70 minutes shorter, Heaven's Gate bombed again, and MGM bought out the financially crippled United Artists. The ailing Western genre virtually vanished during the 1980s, Cimino's career never recovered, and Hollywood studios had had enough of bankrolling financially risky ventures by "auteur" directors. Heaven's Gate's reputation recovered somewhat after its video release, as it garnered praise from some viewers for such visually remarkable sequences as the Harvard dance and the final battle, as well as for David Mansfield's haunting score. Steven Bach's book Final Cut provides a full production history.


Heaven's Gate is a 1980 American epic Western film portraying a fictional dispute between land barons and European immigrants in Wyoming in the 1890s. The film is loosely based on the Johnson County War. The cast includes Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Isabelle Huppert, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Joseph Cotten, Geoffrey Lewis, David Mansfield, Richard Masur, Terry O'Quinn, Mickey Rourke, and, in his first film role (uncredited), Willem Dafoe.
The film was written, directed and produced (in part) by American film director Michael Cimino.
There were major setbacks in the film's production due to cost and time overruns, negative press, and rumors about Cimino's allegedly overbearing directorial style. It is generally considered one of the biggest box office bombs of all time, and in some circles has been considered to be one of the worst films ever made. It opened to poor reviews and earned less than $3 million domestically (from an estimated budget of $44 million), eventually contributing to the near collapse of its studio, United Artists, and effectively destroying the reputation of Cimino, previously one of the ascendant directors of Hollywood owing to his celebrated 1978 film The Deer Hunter, which had won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director in 1979.[6] Cimino had an expansive and ambitious vision for the film and pushed it about four times over its planned budget. The movie's financial problems and United Artists' consequent demise led to a move away from director-driven film production in the American film industry and a shift toward greater studio control of films.[7]
As time has progressed, a number of substantial assessments have become more nuanced and in some cases more positive,[8][9] and now some critics have described Heaven's Gate as a "modern masterpiece" whose 1980 re-edit after poor press screenings was characterized as "one of the greatest injustices of cinematic history."


The final cut finally premiered at New York's Cinema 1 theater on November 19, 1980. The premiere was, by all accounts, a disaster. During the intermission, the audience was so subdued that Cimino was said to have asked why no one was drinking the champagne. He was reportedly told by his publicist, "Because they hate the movie, Michael."[18]
New York Times critic Vincent Canby panned the film, calling it "an unqualified disaster," comparing it to "a forced four-hour walking tour of one's own living room."[19] Canby went even further by stating that "[i]t 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."[19]
After a sparsely attended one-week run, Cimino and United Artists quickly pulled the film from any further releases, completely postponing a full worldwide release.[8]
In April 1981 in Los Angeles, the film resurfaced in a "director's cut" two-hour twenty-nine minute (149 minute) version that Cimino had once again recut for a third time.[8] Reviewing the shorter cut in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert criticized the film's formal choices and its narrative inconsistencies and incredulities, concluding that the film was "[t]he most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen, and remember, I've seen Paint Your Wagon."[20]
Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times issued a dissenting opinion when he reviewed the shortened film, becoming one of its few American champions, calling it "a true screen epic."[8] The film closed after the second week, having grossed only $1.3 million total on its $44 million budget


n subsequent years, however, some critics have come to the defense of the film beginning with European critics who praised the film after it played at the Cannes Film Festival.[8][9] Robin Wood was an early champion of Heaven's Gate and its reassessment, calling it "one of the few authentically innovative Hollywood films...It seems to me, in its original version, among the supreme achievements of the Hollywood cinema."[21][22] David Thomson calls the film "a wounded monster" and argues that the film takes part in "a rich American tradition (Melville, James, Ives, Pollock, Parker) that seeks a mighty dispersal of what has gone before. In America, there are great innovations in art that suddenly create fields of apparent emptiness. They may seem like omissions or mistakes at first. Yet in time we come to see them as meant for our exploration."[23] Martin Scorsese has said that the film has many overlooked virtues.[24] Some of these critics have attempted to impugn the motives of the earliest reviewers. Robin Wood noted, in his initial review of the film, reviewers tended to pile on the film, attempting to "outdo [one an]other with sarcasm and contempt."[21] Several members of the cast and crew have complained that the initial reviews of the film were tainted by its production history and that daily critics were reviewing it as a business story as much as a motion picture.[8] In April 2011, the staff of Time Out London selected Heaven's Gate as the 12th greatest Western.[25]
Beyond this, much of the critical estimation of the film continues to be low; in 2008, film critic Joe Queenan of The Guardian named Heaven's Gate the worst film ever made.[6] It holds a 45% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, although several of the 29 reviews aggregated there were published for the film's initial release.


The film's unprecedented $44-million cost (equivalent to about $122 million as of 2012) and poor performance at the box office ($3,484,331 gross in the United States) generated more negative publicity than actual financial damage, causing Transamerica Corporation, United Artists' corporate owner, to become anxious over its own public image and withdraw from film production altogether.
Transamerica then sold United Artists to MGM, which effectively ended the existence of the studio. MGM would later revive the name "United Artists" as a subsidiary division. While the money loss due to Heaven's Gate was considerable, United Artists was still a thriving studio with a steady income provided by the James Bond, Pink Panther and Rocky franchises. But many movie insiders have argued that UA was already struggling at the time after box office flops like Cruising and Foxes, both released earlier in 1980 (though the former film was not even produced by UA).
The fracas had a wider effect on the American film industry. During the 1970s, relatively young directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, William Friedkin, and Steven Spielberg had been given unprecedentedly large budgets with very little studio control (see New Hollywood). The studios evolved away from the director-driven film and eventually led to the new paradigm of the high concept feature, epitomized by Jaws and Star Wars. However, the directors' power lessened considerably, as a result of disappointing box-office performers such as both Friedkin's Sorcerer (1977) and Cruising (1980), and culminating in Coppola's One from the Heart and Cimino's Heaven's Gate. As the new high-concept paradigm of filmmaking became more entrenched, studio control of budgets and productions became tighter, ending the free-wheeling excesses that had begotten Heaven's Gate.
The very poor box office performance of the film had an especially negative impact on Western films, which had enjoyed a revival in the late 1960s. From that point on, very few Western films were released by major studios, save for a brief revival thanks to the Oscar-winning hits Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, Young Guns, and Tombstone.

Release Date: November 19, 1980 @ The Cinema I

Distrib: United Artists

Boxoffice: $3,484,331 2013: $10,569,600