Cimino - The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate and the Price of a Vision

I saw Heaven’s Gate when it first came out in London – in the radically cut version that followed its disastrous US premier – and sat in the cinema with my eyeballs popping out. Yes, it was boring and hard to follow at times, but the scale of what was on the screen, the colour, the details in the costumes and the backgrounds and the intense, explosive emotion… all of that made for an unforgettable experience.

But making – let alone releasing – a film about rapacious capitalism and downtrodden immigrants to the USA just as Ronald Reagan was coming to power in 1980 was an idea doomed to failure. And fail it did. Spectacularly.

The man responsible for that failure, in all his secretive, mysterious, driven and egotistical glory is the subject of this terrific book. It’s a wonderfully readable account of a genuinely gifted individual who just didn’t seem to understand the meaning of the word ‘Enough’ and who, when the success of The Deer Hunter gave him the financial clout to realise his truly epic vision of the Johnson County War in 1890s Wyoming, didn’t stop until he’d got it totally, perfectly, precisely right!

Now he’s dead, and we still don’t really understand him – even though the book does its impressive, exhaustive, fair-handed best to try – but we’ve still got the films: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Deer Hunter, Year of the Dragon and yes, Heaven’s Gate. And they continue to delight, impress and amaze.