Word: deere
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...right for Vietnam. Gloria Emerson certainly comes as close as anyone to creating the definitive Vietnam work with her passionate profiles of individuals in Winners and Losers. Maybe the right medium is film; but Apocalypse Now veered away from Vietnam too soon to stake a claim, and The Deer Hunter, in its attempt to explain why all wars exist, failed altogether. Or perhaps it's television--a televised benediction for the televised war. But television in America wouldn't ever be willing to risk the necessary time and talent for such a project...
Perhaps critics owed Michael Cimino that much when, last November, they sat in a Manhattan theater for the first screening of Heaven's Gate. The critics had praised Cimino's pictorial and political extravagances in The Deer Hunter; here he was describing another romantic triangle tested in time of war. It had taken him two years and $36 million to make his 3-hr. 40-min. western, so they'd better eat all of it. They didn't: the critics were outraged by the expenditure of all that time, talent, money and solemnity on a story...
...pinching was back in style, and the omnipotent auteur was on the ropes. U.A. Executive Steven Bach, who once called Cimino "the Michelangelo of film," now pointed out that his director had been "behind five days in shooting- in six days." Universal's Ned Tanen noted that The Deer Hunter, which his studio coproduced, had gone 50% over budget. Sherry Lansing of 20th Century-Fox assured the company's owner-to-be, Marvin Davis, that "there are no Heaven 's Gates here." When Producer Ray Stark was asked what he would do with a self-indulgent director...
Michael Cimino thought he was John Ford. Everbody told him he was. His movie was a hit, America, the critics said, was ready to grieve over its tarnished honor and indomitable spirit. Despite its relentlessly bland directorial style, its contrived, overdone script, its torturous three-hour length, The Deer Hunter moved audiences with its sheer emotional power. The movie got all its force from an amazing cast that included Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep, and Christopher Walken, Cimino, though, was a talented, but unimaginative, amateur: it was obvious in every frame. Yet the movie "touched a chord." While the socially conscious...
Heaven's Gate is not "an unqualified disaster." Cimino has discovered that cameras move, so, unlike The Deer Hunter, his new movie isn't almost entirely composed of long and medium shots with the camera staring. There are some exhilirating, sweeping pans of the vast homestead and interesting tracking through the streets of Casper, Wyo. In two parallel scenes--a waltz in Harvard Yard (it's actually Oxford) at the beginning of the film and a party at the Heaven's Gate Skating Arena in Wyoming--Cimino's camera moves with a lovely, fluid grace, catching...