Heaven’s Gate

Harvard graduate Jim Averill becomes a marshal in Wyoming and finds himself caught up in the bloody conflict between powerful cattle barons and impoverished immigrants. He finds himself pitted against a former university friend who now represents the ranchers’ interests. When Averill learns of a death list authorising the murder of 125 settlers, he takes a stand against the large landowners. A brothel owner and sympathiser of the immigrants (Isabelle Huppert), who is interested in Averill, is also on the list … The film was initially maligned as one of the biggest flops in film history, but in later years came to be increasingly recognised as a masterpiece. (tb)

‘If Heaven’s Gate embodies the excesses of the 1970s New Hollywood generation, then it should also represent the revolutionary spirit that underlies it – the determination to reject the myths and traditions to which studio cinema had stubbornly clung. First and foremost, the film is an anti-Western and, at the same time, anti-Western in its outlook, as it deals with how the civilising forces that tamed the country in the mid- to late 19th century were in reality the henchmen who violently suppressed the dreams of immigrants and other downtrodden people. Immigrants may have built America, the film suggests, but few were able to share in that prosperity.” (Scott Tobias, The Guardian, Nov 2020)