Heaven's Gate (1980)
Directed by Michael Cimino
Harvard graduate James Averill serves as the sheriff of prosperous Jackson County, Wyoming, standing at the center of a conflict between impoverished immigrants and affluent cattle farmers. Politically connected ranchers enlist mercenary Nathan Champion—who is also vying for the affections of local madam Ella Watson—to combat the immigrant uprising. As tensions escalate, both Averill and Champion start to question their decisions.
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8 films that influenced Heaven's Gate
What critics say influenced Heaven's Gate
In that sense, the film that Heaven's Gate most resembles isn't a western at all, but Marcel Carné's Children of Paradise .
In George Stevens's Shane the Johnson County war is enacted on two planes: the sodbusters confronting the pioneer rancher Ryker on a realistic level; Alan Ladd's angelic Shane facing up to Jack Palance's evil gunslinger Wilson in a mythic manner.
An early scene of new settlers trudging along a dusty road is meant to inspire awe, but instead it looks as if a traveling company of "Fiddler on the Roof" is ambling into town.
Like The Godfather, Heaven's Gate, now re-released in the director's cut, is deeply influenced in its stately pace and its extended sequences by Luchino Visconti's Marxist masterwork The Leopard and unfolds in three parts.
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Like The Godfather, Heaven's Gate, now re-released in the director's cut, is deeply influenced in its stately pace and its extended sequences by Luchino Visconti's Marxist masterwork The Leopard and unfolds in three parts.
The only film that I can immediately think of that works in a similar way, for similar ends, is Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon , from which Heaven's Gate is taking so many of its lighting cues that I take it for granted that Cimino & Co. must have seen it.
And there are moments which are indelible for being bad, to be fair: the violent death scene that closes out the main story is embarrassingly staged, a knock-off Bonnie and Clyde with none of its impact, only schmaltziness.
"Heaven's Gate" never became the "Lawrence of Arabia" or the "Doctor Zhivago" of the 1980s, as Cimino had intended it to be.