Scouring the first-take obituaries for film-maker Michael Cimino over the weekend, it is interesting to note how many elevated the notorious Heaven's Gate - a film alleged to have destroyed Hollywood – over his 1978 Oscar-winner The Deer Hunter.
“Particularly saddened by the death of Michael Cimino, a martyr of critics and scandalists, at least he lived to see his masterwork acclaimed,” Richard Brody, the influential New Yorker critic, wrote. He was not speaking about The Deer Hunter.
On the release of Heaven’s Gate in 1980, Richard Canby, the New York Times reviewer, suggested the film “fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the devil has just come around to collect”.
Brody is right to suggest that Heaven’s Gate enjoyed positive reassessment, but the Marxist western had always been viewed more kindly in Europe. The standing ovation that greeted a restored print at the Venice Film Festival in 2012 expressed long-held affection for an unfairly maligned masterpiece.
Cimino, who has died in Los Angeles at the age of 77, had done good work before he came to direct The Deer Hunter. He co-wrote the cult ecological science-fiction film Silent Running.
His feature debut, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, a surprisingly sad caper film starring Jeff Bridges and Clint Eastwood, was very well received in 1974. But it was always likely that, on his death, his career would be assessed in terms of the two later films.
Cimino was born in New York to a well-off, third-generation Italian family. He studied painting at Yale and, at one stage, seemed destined to become an architect.
This was, however, the era when Madison Avenue press-ganged all available visually gifted geniuses towards advertising. As a commercials director, he quickly received a reputation for creative élan and (significantly) obsessive fastidiousness.
In 1971, he moved to LA and sought work as a screenwriter. His “spec” script for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot impressed Clint Eastwood who put the film into production and asked Cimino to work with John Milius on the screenplay for Magnum Force.
By the time he came to make The Deer Hunter, the "Vietnam movie" was, just three years after the US withdrawal, already becoming a genre. Hal Ashby's Coming Home was released the same year. Ted Post's Go Tell the Spartans was also in cinemas.
Cimino’s film combined a gentle, sombre portrait of life in blue-collar Pennsylvania with a frantic, sometimes overheated portrayal of the Asian conflict. The sudden cut from a piano playing Chopin in a rustbelt bar to violent chaos in Vietnam was startling. The later depictions of Russian roulette remain controversial. It all ends (ironically?) with God Bless America.
Coming towards the end – though nobody knew it at the time – of the great “post-classical” period in American cinema, The Deer Hunter found roles for such voguish actors as Robert De Niro, John Cazale, Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken. It beat Midnight Express and Coming Home to the best picture Oscar at the 51st ceremony.
The production of Heaven’s Gate, a study of the 1890 Johnson County war, was so disordered, controversial and ruinous that it inspired one of the great books on Hollywood: Stephen Bach’s Final Cut.
Even the film’s now numerous defenders must admit that there was a fatal lack of discipline on set. Such were the delays that John Hurt managed to film all of The Elephant Man in between two visits to the set in the American west. It is said that 220 hours of footage were shot. Cimino rebuilt enormous sets because one detail looked out of place.
For all the foul pre-release publicity it remains surprising that so few US critics recognised Heaven’s Gate as one of the great films on the immigrant experience.
The picture's financial failure brought down United Artists and – just as Francis Ford Coppola was exercising similar megalomania on Apocalypse Now – gave the studios an excuse to reign in "indulgent" directors. Many histories blamed Heaven's Gate for ending the creative boom that elevated US cinema in the early 1970s, but, in truth, the success of Star Wars and Jaws a few years earlier, had already shown studios that they didn't need to be taking risks on grown-up cinema such as The Godfather or Chinatown.
Cimino did get more films made, but he never recovered from the bashing that came the way of Heaven’s Gate. Year of the Dragon, a thriller starring Mickey Rourke, was exciting, but was let down by racist portrayals of Chinese Americans and an apparent indulgence of violence towards women.
His remake of the Humphrey Bogart classic, The Desperate Hours, was laughed out of town. In the early 1990s, he circled a proposed Michael Collins biopic with Gabriel Byrne in the lead. (The project also interested Kevin Costner before Neil Jordan delivered in 1996.)
In recent years, now unrecognisable in a thinner frame and with a strange mop top, he made some eccentric appearances on the festival circuit. The man who ruled Hollywood for the shortest imaginable period remained impressively unrepentant.
“Nobody lives without making mistakes,” he said. “I don’t believe in defeat. Everybody has bumps, but as Count Basie said: ‘It’s not how you handle the hills, it’s how you handle the valleys.’”
