Thoughts on Heaven's Gate
I wonder if anyone can have an untarnished, innocent view on Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino's infamous flop from 1980. Getting new, virgin minds to see it and pronounce on its qualities one way or the other would surely be as hard as it must have been to put together an unbiased jury for the O.J. Simpson trial. It might be worth the effort, though, of travelling to the far corners of Outer Mongolia or the primary schools of Milton Keynes, to find a sample group of people who had never heard anything about the film's travails, about its hellish, expensive and overlong shooting period, its demolition by critics, its flopping at the box office to the extent that it sank United Artists, its gradual lauding by certain critics as an unrecognised masterpiece, its remastering. Perhaps we should get this imaginary cross-section of people - they would have to be well-versed in cinema in order to appreciate the film's merits as well as recognise its flaws, all the while having neve