Salem Press

The Eighties in America offers comprehensive coverage of the impact of the 1980's on the United States and Canada. With free, unlimited online access to all the "Decades" titles in your collection.

Heaven's Gate
Heaven's Gate became one of the most famous box-office flops in film history. The film's well-publicize demise helped end the 1970's trend of young directors being given significant control of their films. It also contributed to the demise of the United Artists studio.

Heaven's Gate dramatized the 1892 Johnson County, Wyoming, range war, in which rich cattle ranchers, with the alleged approval of the U.S. government, hired a mercenary army to kill immigrant farmers homesteading on their grazing lands. The gritty and violent film discarded many standard Western conventions yet featured breathtaking sequences like the Harvard graduation ball, a frontier dance on rollerskates, and the climactic battle between immigrants and mercenaries.

When the film finally premiered, American critics condemned the three hour, thirty-nine minute epic as pretentious, overlong, incoherent, self-indulgent, and even un-American. United Artists, which had financed the film, immediately withdrew it from release. While Cimino reedited the film in an attempt to salvage it, the print and television media relentlessly ridiculed him and his movie, creating a permanent impression in the public's mind that it was one of the worst films ever made. Rereleased in early 1981 in a 2 and one-half hour version, Heaven's Gate earned only $1.5 million at the box office and made Westerns unfashionable for a decade.