Spine 636: Heaven’s Gate

After Micheal Cimino's The Deer Hunter won five Oscars, United Artists gave him carte blanche for his next film and he really went to town. As in he built and rebuilt at least one whole town, on stilts in a National Park so as not to damage the landscape. If only he'd waited 45 years he could have just bought Glacier National Park outright and really become his film's villains. Anyway, the film was hemorrhaging money is what I'm saying, and is all the better for it.

A slight fictionalization of the historical Johnson County War, Heaven's Gate (1980) is a beautifully shot epic western where Cimino sought to just tell the stories of real people and forgot that talking about real people in their historical context is what historical materialism is. Cimino's seemingly accidental Marxism was not lost on star Kris Kristofferson, and Cimino even changed some details to ratchet up the class conflict that was, historically, already at a fever pitch.

And, hey, it's not often that the historical villains we see in our Criterion films are still around and even have a website that glosses over their government-approved extrajudicial mass murders. "Guardians of Wyoming's Cow Country since 1872" and still shaping society 150 years later, because that's what happens when you don't stop greedy men from seizing absolute power.