Word: cimino
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...supposed to be a disaster movie. It was supposed to be a western. But when the New York critics saw Michael Cimino's $36 million Heaven's Gate at its first screening last Tuesday, they deemed it "an unqualified disaster." Executives at United Artists, who had bankrolled Cimino's eulogy to the Old West but never, until that moment, seen it in its final form, were scurrying to anxious meetings, acting out the rearranging-of-the-deck-chairs scene from The Titanic. Cimino must have wished he were in Airport-any airport. After all, his previous film...
Even before Cimino's spectacular immolation, the evidence on the screen portended commercial disaster. Heaven's Gate is a serious western, a genre that has not spawned a popular hit in more than a decade. The film's stars-Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken and French Actress Isabelle Huppert-have never provoked stampedes to the box office, and they light no sparks here. The film moves at a glacial pace toward degradation and death: when the cavalry rides to the rescue, it saves the bad guys. The movie's narrative is as incoherent, its plot points...
Meryl Streep could obviously have made it to the screen on looks alone. Says Director Michael Cimino, who worked with her on The Deer Hunter: "The camera embraces her." Lucky camera. Many women would kill for her slender, fashion-model figure, for that ash-blond hair, oval face, porcelain skin and those high, exquisite cheekbones. Her eyes mirror intelligence; their pale blue sparkle demands a new adjective: merulean. Only a slight bump down the plane of her long, patrician nose redeems her profile from perfection...
...Cimino believes in the intensity of his method. He told TIME Correspondent James Willwerth on location: "You follow an obsession. It leads you somewhere. If you make an honest film, the audience will relate to the people who live and die in that film. Your obsession has nothing to do with it." More simply, he explains: "You make a movie with as much passion as you can bring to it-and people respond...
Heaven's Gate, like The Deer Hunter, is a morality play that does not aspire to strict factual accuracy. To Cimino the new film's historical period is "not terribly different from the late 1960s. It was a period of turmoil. There was a sense of guilt and responsibility in the country." This perhaps is Cimino's real obsession: to analyze the psyche of a society in conflict. He hopes soon to look at the 18th century, in a film about the Sioux culture. That movie, Cimino insists, will be told in subtitled Indian dialogue. No doubt...