Heaven's Gate is the litmus test of appreciation of film. The fact that I think it a masterpiece can be taken as evidence of how unreliable my opinions of movies are and the irrelevance of my views on what will win and what ought to win at the Academy Awards on Sunday. But I don't care.
Written and directed by Michael Cimino, Heaven's Gate is the definitive account of the making of modern America, a film of high ambition and deep seriousness, with a series of huge set-pieces that put the opening extravaganza at the 2012 Olympics in the ha'penny place. There are performances of unrelieved brilliance from Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, John Hurt, Mickey Rourke, Willem Dafoe, Rosie Vela and too many others to mention.
Its opening in 1980 incited an angry barrage of denunciation. It ran for three days in a single New York theatre. It came close to bankrupting United Artists.
The film's reputation has since been somewhat restored, partly due to the persistent advocacy of Philip French, recently retired after 50 years as film correspondent of the Observer, and of the late Michael Dwyer in this newspaper. But only a tiny minority of filmgoers can have seen it. For most critics, it remains a byword for indulgent excess and terrible failure.
The vehemence of reaction 35 years ago ought to have alerted anyone attuned to the culture of the age to the possibility that there was more going on here than met the eye. "A numbing shambles . . . a movie you want to deface . . . the work of a poseur who got found out," wrote Pauline Kael in the New Yorker.
‘Unqualified disaster’
"It's jerry-built, a ship that slides straight to the bottom . . . something quite rare in movies – an unqualified disaster," offered Vincent Canby in the New York Times.
It drew a single Oscar nomination, for art direction but “triumphed” at the alternative Raspberry Awards, winning worst film, worst director, worst screenplay, worst score and worst actor (Kristofferson).
It cannot have been that Americans were resistant to unflattering accounts of the birth of the nation. A decade earlier, Little Big Man (Arthur Penn) and Soldier Blue (Ralph Nelson) told the story of the ethnic cleansing of the West from the victim people's point of view. Both were hailed as brilliant, necessary and overdue. Dotson Rader wrote in the New York Times: "Soldier Blue must be numbered among the most significant, the most brutal and liberating, the most honest American films ever made."
The key word there is "liberating". The word for Heaven's Gate is "disturbing".
Mercenary army
Cimino had come across the story while researching the history of barbed wire. At the heart of his scenario lies the Johnson County War in Wyoming in 1892.
On one side was a mercenary army imported by cattle barons out to enclose the land and to change the law so as to legitimise their ownership, thus to accumulate the capital to become one with the industrial barons emerging as the real ruling class. On the other, poor, mostly eastern European homesteaders. What’s remarkable is that the mass of the homesteaders emerge as the hero; albeit, of course, that they lost the war.
The final set-piece shows the homesteaders acting in concert to encircle the bosses' private army and attempt a pre-emptive strike. The battle that follows lasts 50 minutes and leaves the land glutted with gore. Heaven's Gate is about the shaping of America through the clash of the classes, the consolidation of capitalism, red in tooth and claw. It was released two weeks after Ronald Reagan's election as president, his theme of "It's morning in America!" having matched the prevailing mood.
Cimino’s masterpiece didn’t offer any comfortable way of looking at things. It told a truth that America couldn’t handle.
Another six weeks on, on January 20th 1981, as Reagan delivered his inaugural address, Iran released 52 hostages kidnapped during the 1979 Khomeini revolution. Six other Americans who had taken refuge in the Canadian embassy had been sprung through a caper involving a fake film. Argo, which won best film at the Oscars two years ago, is a jolly and heartwarming version of the story.
The announcement of Argo's victory came not from Seth MacFarlane at the Dolby Stage in Hollywood but by picture-link from the White House by Michelle Obama, backed by a detachment of US marines in full dress uniform.
What was most remarkable about this was it sparked no serious controversy. The occasion was as political as the response to Heaven's Gate.
American Sniper will probably win a few gilded prizes on Sunday. Not that it should matter much to lovers of movies.