best film: Raging Bull from Martin Scorsese
The performance from Robert De Niro is what is discussed the most often and for good reason. This is truly one of the great performances (if not THE greatest- it would have my vote) in cinema history. But as much as I love good screen acting, this is also Scorsese’s best directed film and that is simply more important. The opening credits are beautiful enough to make you weep, the in-ring tracking shots (on roller skates by director of photography Michael Chapman), zooms, and manipulation of lighting (see above with the shot of Johnny Barnes the actor playing Sugar Ray) make for some of the best sequences in the history of the art form.
- From the onset of the film with the Cavalleria Rusticana Intermezzo from Mascagni with slow-motion photography and the fog behind the ring you know you’re witnessing a masterpiece
- The sequences in the ring have a strong case for being the greatest directed cinema in the art form’s history – Scorsese masterfully speeds up and slows down the photography. He uses flashbulbs for lighting, for psychological effect, and for those exquisite freeze-frames to accentuate the violence and brutality of the moment
- Plain documentary like black and white titles on the date and time – which grounds the film in realism but I agree with this take as well— Jeffrey M. Anderson from Combustible Celluloid “The boxing sequences have little to do with reality, but cinematically they explode.”
- I forget, even after seeing the film 8-10 times, we start with the older Jake LaMotta in 1964— sad, fat, and it’s jaw-dropping to see De Niro (our greatest actor in his and (our collective) greatest performance) with the transformation – Cole Smithey from Cole Smithey.com “Robert De Niro’s metamorphosis into boxing legend Jake La Motta (AKA the Bronx Bull) is one of the most impressive acting transformations on celluloid.”
- When we go back to 1941 we get the bell ringing and Scorsese’s trademark rolling tracking shot in on the boxing corner—magnificent
- I think the servicemen fighting in the stands, the chaos, is important to understanding the Scorsese worldview. This isn’t Norman Rockwell’s 1941—and the riots in Gangs of New York, the mob in Last Temptation– this is an edgier New York—an tenser world—very East coast NYC, Jersey, Philly, Boston
- There’s an odd nobility in this complex character “I ain’t going down for nobody” in him wanting to make it without the mob. It’s tragic when he cries (along with his trainer) and when he throws the fight, you feel it—despite his behavior towards everyone else (wife, brother). The boxing world is a metaphor for the world and it’s, again, a hard world—a rigged game. And he’s a sinful man (at best— he’s a monster as well).
- Both the film and LaMotta are relentless. It’s a difficult watch—unbearably uncomfortable at times like a von Trier film.
- Strong take from Camby at the NY Times- “Though Raging Bull has only three principal characters, it is a big film, its territory being the landscape of the soul.”
- It’s also a great pairing with Taxi Driver in so many ways including the characters of Travis Bickle. Cathy Moriarty’s “Vickie” (with her low Lauren-Bacall or Scar-Jo-like voice) is his Cybil but he has the clout as a boxer to land her as his wife. He’s clearly as toxic as Travis. Scorsese shoots their obsession (Ebert talks about the Madonna/Whore complex of LaMotta here and in Scorsese’s work) of these women with dazzling slow-motion photography. At first it’s infatuation and arguably love—then it becomes a very unhealthy possession and paranoia—from Ebert—“From LaMotta’s point of view, Vickie sometimes floats in slow motion toward another man. The technique fixes the moment in our minds; we share LaMotta’s exaggeration of an innocent event”
- The first fight with Sugar Ray is Michael Chapman (the cinematographer) and Scorsese on fully display—rolling around the ring on roller skates for smooth tracking shots. We speed up the photography, whip pan, slow down the photography, freeze, flashbulbs. It’s the full display of cinematic abilities and the scene previously mentioned in consideration for the greatest display of film style in a two-minute span. It’s loud— bravado– expressionism. In the second Sugar Ray fight there’s just fog/smoke pouring in.
- Another Copa scene and here it’s Pesci’s turn to carry the film. Pesci- what a revelation in 1980—to have the acting chops to spar with De Niro and not get blasted off the screen is almost unfathomable. In the Copa scene he carries large chunks without De Niro in it at all. He beats Frank Vincent here and it’s spellbinding.
- Before the title fight there’s the stunning tracking shot “oner”- that would be repeated by Creed with Ryan Coogler showing off his abundance of talent as a young auteur.
- I see it as a companion to Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and New York New York as we get to see the crazy talents of De Niro as an improvisational artist. In each film he has a jousting partner—here it’s largely Pesci and they’re sublime together. This is the first of their five collaborations (this, one short scene in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, Goodfellas, Casino and The Irishman).
marvelous lighting here from Scorsese- the scenes between fights are in many ways more violent, and certainly more difficult for the horror on display—the psychological and physical violence he inflicts. The scene of him knocking down the door before he punches Moriarty out is reminiscent of the stalking by Michael Myers in Halloween or Jack in The Shining but without the reprieve of being in the horror genre
- Laughable take from David Kehr of the Chicago Reader– “I can’t pan it, but this 1980 fantasy biography of fighter Jake LaMotta seems unquestionably Martin Scorsese’s weakest work, at least to that point in his career.”
For the Sugar Ray Robinson title fight (LaMotta loses the belt) we have the expressionistic display of lighting- genius. It goes dark in the ring. Steam pours out. And then we get an exaggerated violent montage that is an editing sequence on the level of Hitchcock’s shower editing sequence. The flashbulbs are there again, the line about never getting knocked down
the blood dripping off the rope in a perfect on a wall in an art museum photography
- it’s Thelma Schoonmaker’s greatest moment as an editor (she won the Academy Award for her work here)- one of the greatest displays of editing in cinema
- The acting is such a tour-de-force—brash—big. He’s evil, complex, tortured and the physical transformation level of method inspired generations of actors
a awe-inspiring finale- it is a nod to On the Waterfront and Brando. It’s a bookend with the opening. It also have connected tissue to PT Anderson’s Boogie Nights (17 years later of course)—the text is so rich. Scorsese holds on the empty mirror and then we go to the passage of John about the sinful man
most underrated: This spot used to be reserved for Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate but the reputation for that film (probably because of the advent of bluray) has grown over the last decade. Because of that (and it is phenomenal to see a film’s reputation get right-sided like it has for Cimino’s work), there’s nothing egregiously underrated in 1980. If forced to pick one, I’ll go with Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill which should be somewhere near the bottom of the TSPDT top 1000 but isn’t. De Palma didn’t have chops as a writer, and frankly, didn’t have a ton of new story ideas (this one borrows from Hitchcock so much it’s tough not to call it a remake), but he has such technical prowess and pure cinema style that you just have to sit back and admire. Stardust Memories from Woody should be on the TSPDT and isn’t- same for Schrader’s American Gigolo. Schrader somehow doesn’t have one single film on the TSPDT top 1000…silliness.
De Palma’s Dressed to Kill- always in the wake of Hitchcock
De Palma is THE director most associated with the use of the split diopter — a simulated deep focus shot– there are more than a dozen in Dressed to Kill
a highlight from De Palma’s film with the lighting- I doubt it was an influence- but reminded me of a similar shot from a 2001 film Millennium Mambo from Hsiao-Hsien Hou http://thecinemaarchives.com/2019/08/28/millennium-mambo-2001-hsiao-hsien-hou/
from Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo – a dedication to the Venetian blind noir aesthetic
the blinds are used throughout — John Bailey is the DP and George Gaines did the set decoration (All the President’s Men)
Paul Schrader is certainly one of the underrated auteurs by the critical consensus — he doesn’t have a single film currently on the TSPDT top 1000
most overrated: There are a few easy choices here. Godard’s Every Man For Himself sits at #771 on the TSPDT consensus list. It’s a fine film, but the three films in bold above this here in the underrated section are superior. We’re twenty years removed from Breathless here in 1980 and it is painfully clear that the 1960’s Godard isn’t coming back. I think they are both funny films- but there are far too many artistically rendered films (yes, including comedies) to include Airplane! or The Blues Brothers on any top 1000 list. Right now, they sit at #771 and #801 respectively on the TSPDT list.
gems I want to spotlight: The Long Good Friday just misses my top 10 of the year below and features a terrific bulldog of a performance by Bob Hoskins and a plot that has basically has his entire world slowly collapse on him. Ebert has high praise for the film and Hoskins saying, “I have rarely seen a movie character so completely alive. Shand is an evil, cruel, sadistic man. But he’s a mass of contradictions, and there are times when we understand him so completely we almost feel affectionate.” Also, if you’re a horror enthusiast—both The Fog and The Changeling are films from 1980 to seek out.
trends and notables:
- 1980 is a fabulous year with two top 100 films (including one top 10) and perhaps as many as five masterpieces (I’m not convinced Heaven’s Gate isn’t one). So, if the great era of cinema (American cinema specifically- as five of the top six are American) is coming to an end- there’s no sign of it yet in terms of the output in 1980.
- Heaven’s Gate is often pointed to as the film that ruined everything with the New Hollywood movement. Cimino, coming off The Deer Hunter in 1978, was given a massive budget, creative control, a talented ensemble cast, and it just went on and on—he shot miles and miles of film. All of this may be true- (I always try to soak up details on the production as I find it fascinating)- but the evidence on screen indicates that Cimino is simply a genius.
Heaven’s Gate has aged well artistically but at the time it was a sight of an auteur out of control, shooting for months and months, way over budget, and with no oversight by the “money”
shot by Vilmos Zsigmond- he said, “Cimino really wanted to make a perfect film. He could have made this film for much less. He overdid it; he over-complicated it. But they should not have killed him for it.” Zsigmond also said Cimino was tough to work with- but as a director he was one of the very best.
Kris Kristofferson washed in splendid natural light
Heaven’s Gate, not to be confused with Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), is certainly beautiful enough to be confused with Malick masterpiece
the cast includes Kristofferson and Huppert (here), and Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Bridges, Joseph Cotten and Brad Dourif among others
- Look at the big year and trend towards black and white films in 1980. Raging Bull, Stardust Memories (Allen’s second after Manhattan the previous year), The Elephant Man.
from David Lynch’s The Elephant Man— black and white films are no longer the majority – but in 1980 they comprise three of the best films of the year
from Woody’s Stardust Memories— his update on Fellini’s 8 1/2. This is one of I believe five Woody films in black and white- this, Manhattan, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, and Celebrity
- At the box office Lucas and The Empire Strikes Back dominates—it doubles the next biggest film domestically. And 1981’s champion is a 1980 film as well- Superman II– John Williams— take a bow.
George Lucas knew what he had here with this cinematic painting- a shot repeated at least three times near the end of Empire
it would be wrong to ignore the beauty of The Empire Strikes Back or dismiss it’s artistic merit just because of the financial success or the impact of the Star Wars universe
creative set design and world-building
- It’s been since 1975 (Barry Lyndon) since we had a Kubrick year so that is exciting. Kubrick seems to operate outside of time with how his films feel–when I look at trends and movements he’s really on his own. Enjoy this- it’ll be a while before we see Kubrick again in 1987 with Full Metal Jacket.
if you’re going to made a film in 1975 and sit out the rest of the 1970’s — it helps to land with yet another top 100 film like Kubrick did with The Shining
angles and hallways– Kubrick regularly distorts the space- “the one point perspective”
exacting detail in every frame
…with big bathing splashes of color
cinema of dread… Kubrick puts to shame lesser genre efforts using jump scare tactics
- Jonathan Demme gave us his first archiveable film with Melvin and Howard and Jim Jarmusch arrives with his first, Permanent Vacation.
- As for actors, Isabelle Huppert would be wonderful in her archiveable debut in Cimino’s massive ensemble Heaven’s Gate (she’s really the only female I can remember in the film). She’s also in Godard’s film. Joe Pesci would give us a stunning archiveable debut with his work in Raging Bull. If you blink you’ll miss him but John Turturro’s first film that lands in the archives is Raging Bull as well. Turturro is remembered for his work with The Coen Brothers and Spike Lee- and rightly so- but certainly the start here and the little role in Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986) couldn’t hurt his career.
- Lastly, and sadly, 1980 would be the last archiveable film for Steve McQueen who would pass away entirely too soon (age 50). Tom Horn is far from his best work but it is worthy of the archives an marks two years since he really became a massive star in The Magnificent Seven. He did really quality work and his low-key stoic style was influential and can be seen today in the work of say Ryan Gosling.
best performance male: There’s nothing to debate here—it’s simply time to praise Robert De Niro’s work as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. I’ve read an interview (somewhere at some point) with Paul Schrader, who wrote this screenplay, and he said this was De Niro’s film. He means it was De Niro’s passion project (Schrader says of their three collaborations that his was Taxi Driver and Scorsese’s was The Last Temptation of Christ). Method acting, weight gain and dedication to a role, not to mention just screen acting in general, may have found its apex with De Niro’s work here. I’m pretty sure it’s the greatest of all-time. De Niro’s collaborator on Raging Bull, Joe Pesci, gives the second best performance of the year. Behind those two we have Jack Nicholson who is superb in The Shining. Jack gives the perfect, over-the-top, animated performance Kubrick called for. Gerard Depardieu has the best of the three big parts of Resnais’ Mon oncle d’Amérique. The great French actor was also in Truffaut’s The Last Metro in 1980—not bad doing work with Resnais and Truffaut in one year. The last mention for this category in 1980 is John Hurt for The Elephant Man. It is sort of a combination credit for Hurt for his work here in 1980 and his work just a few years prior in Midnight Express– neither may have quite been worthy on their own.
best performance female: Cathy Moriarty isn’t a household name and didn’t have an overly remarkable career like a Diane Keaton or Isabelle Huppert but her performance in Raging Bull is otherworldly and is my (rather easy) choice for performance of the year here. Behind her I think Hanna Schygulla is a force in Berlin Alexanderplatz. The third and final mention here is for Shelley Duvall in The Shining. Duvall’s performance is peculiar, and I have some problems with it, but in the end, I had to save a spot for her here even if she isn’t as effective as Jack. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that she’s the right actress for the role. I’m not sure this works with Keaton or Meryl.
top 10
- Raging Bull
- The Shining
- The Empire Strikes Back
- Mon oncle d’Amérique
- Heaven’s Gate
- The Elephant Man
- Berlin Alexanderplatz
- Stardust Memories
- Bad Timing
- Dressed To Kill
from Resnais’ Mon oncle d’Amerique– An absolutely masterful dissection of the human condition, an accomplishment in editing, and a piece of cinema that should be used to showcase the possibilities strong film form. It is a highly ambitious film without one single impressive camera movement or singularly beautiful or painterly frame. Starts with the collage of frames on the wall and a bit of a declaration of the attempt here to explain the nature of being
Formally audacious, a procedural deconstruction- not only of a genre, narrative, and film, but of human behavior
from Kurosawa’s Kagemusha– The sunrise shot at 21 minutes should be framed and put on a wall in an museum- a great painting
Kurosawa’s 1980 work is often called a dress rehearsal for his 1985 film Ran
Archives, Directors, and Grades
| American Gigolo- Schrader | HR |
| Atlantic City- Malle | R |
| Bad Timing- Roeg | HR |
| Berlin Alexanderplatz- Fassbinder | MS |
| Dressed To Kill- De Palma | HR |
| Every Man for Himself – Godard | R/HR |
| Gloria- Cassavetes | R |
| Heaven’s Gate- Cimino | MS |
| Kagemusha – Kurosawa | R/HR |
| Melvin and Howard- Demme | HR |
| Mon Oncle d’Amérique – Resnais | MS/MP |
| Ordinary People- Redford | R |
| Out of the Blue- Hopper | R |
| Permanent Vacation – Jarmusch | R |
| Raging Bull – Scorsese | MP |
| Stardust Memories- Allen | MS |
| Superman II- Lester | HR |
| The Big Red One – Fuller | R/HR |
| The Blues Brothers- Landis | R |
| The Changeling- Medak | R |
| The Coal Miner’s Daughter- Apted | R |
| The Elephant Man- Lynch | MS |
| The Empire Strikes Back- Kershner | MP |
| The Fog- Carpenter | R |
| The Last Metro- Truffaut | R |
| The Long Good Friday- Mackenzie | HR |
| The Shining- Kubrick | MP |
| The Stunt Man- Rush | R |
| Tom Horn- Wiard | R |
*MP is Masterpiece- top 1-3 quality of the year film
MS is Must-See- top 5-6 quality of the year film
HR is Highly Recommend- top 10 quality of the year film
R is Recommend- outside the top 10 of the year quality film but still in the archives
@Drake Great notes on Raging Bull. I especially liked the bit about cinematic explosions of the boxing in the film. And that shot with blood on the ropes is just *chef’s kiss*.
I don’t know what else to add. I just remember that when I was watching Raging Bull for the first time and De Niro was warming up in slow motion, I thought – wow, I’m gonna love this movie.)
Only thing I wanted to add that Michael Chapman doesn’t get enough credit for being DP on 2 Scorsese masterpieces. Interesting fact he was also camera operator (not DP) on Klute, Godfather and Jaws.
@Mad Mike – you should check out ASC List of 100 Milestone Films in Cinematography of the 20th Century. Raging bull is in top 10 and taxi driver in top 100.
https://theasc.com/news/asc-unveils-list-of-100-milestone-films-in-cinematography-of-the-20th-century
@M*A*S*H Thanks for the link. I meant that Chapman achivment is rarely discussed between cinephiles (at least in my experience). The focus is more on Scorsese, De Niro, Schreder. Which is fair enough all of them did a fantastic job (especially Marty) but Chapman also, deserves a bit of praise now and then.))
@Mad Mike- Agreed on him. Not only in the context of the movie but in general he’s less talked about. He doesn’t usually comes up when cinematographers of his generation like Willis ,young Zsigmond Or storaro are talked about.
I just shared the list coz I found it interesting. There is one by WGA listing 100 best screenplays, both raging bull and taxi driver get in.
M*A*S*H Yeah, I get it. It a solid list.
And to be fair I don’t think Chapman is on the level of Willis, Zsigmond, Hall and some other top dogs.)
But he shouldn’t be forgotten also.
Love seeing Dressed to Kill in the top 10. It might be De Palma’s most technically superior film. What do you think about the scene near the ending where the psychiatrist explains Michael Caine’s character? It’s obviously taken straight from Psycho (along with several other scenes). I know Roger Ebert complained about that scene in Psycho although he loved everything else about it. I think the scene is more acceptable in this film as De Palma is certainly not a subtle filmmaker so a scene like this makes more sense in his movie that Hitchcock’s.
Have you seen Babylon (1980) it’s a Reggae film on Criterion Channel? 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (not that a great RT score guarantees a masterpiece but it’s rare to find a subpar film with a perfect RT score (assuming a reasonable sample size of course, in this case it’s based on 30 reviews)
@James Trapp – thank you for the share on Babylon- it was not on my radar.
Heaven’s Gate:
– Mercilessly ripped apart for containing so many scenes, such as the skating rink dance or the cockfighting scenes especially, that are “wasteful” and “do nothing to drive forward the plot or narrative over the nearly 4-hour runtime.” Okay… I’d like to see any critic say the exact same thing about, I don’t know, the opening party with that farting uncle in Fanny and Alexander, any pick of scenes from La Dolce Vita or Amarcord, the Sandra Milo mansion scenes in Juliet of the Spirits, the wedding dance sequence in Cimino’s own The Deer Hunter, the Japanese affair getaway in the forest in Yi Yi, the music video scene in Rio Bravo or the aimless hangout scenes in Jules and Jim or Y Tu Mama Tambien. Incredible how when Godard does this in virtually all his films it “dissects the roaming minds of the disattached modern human” but in this film it’s somehow an artistic dumpster. I’d seriously like to see a critic put the spine together to say something like that about any of those films. These people need to be reminded that a film is not about story; it is about mood and powerful imagery, and that even in these scenes important events still happen, like Kristofferson discussing the landowners’ plan to kill off all the immigrants at the cockfight with Bridges for one.
– Anyone who complains about the “terrible” color palette should be asked to look at any frame from The Godfather and compare how similar the colors are in both films.
– I’m sorry if the above got a bit too heated, but I’m just saying I absolutely love this film, it’s amazing and I actually, completely seriously think it is perfect in virtually every way you can imagine and the critics just absolutely massacred it, completely nuked it into oblivion and that is just such crap cause this is one of the best films I’ve ever seen.
– The skating rink itself is the “Heaven’s Gate” of the title and I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of critics saw that as naming the film after such an “unimportant location” and including that in the arguments for panning it; in fact it’s quite a wonderful set piece and forms the background for many of the film’s most major moments, serving as a gathering place for the local townspeople and all and more specifically the achingly beautiful shot Drake describes on Cimino’s page is at this location; fantastic wide shot right there.
– Got flak too for too many romantic side scenes between Huppert and either Kristofferson or Walken where we just kind of watch the two characters sit around in eachother’s arms for a while; the same thing really happened with The New World (another film that tries to capture the spirit of America) and Ryan’s Daughter and all 3 are masterpieces (though clearly Cimino’s and Malick’s films are far stronger than Lean’s with all due respect).
– Films that are less than 10 hours should be banned; ok I’m joking of course but I could easily have watched this for another several hours and it was already coming close to 4. I was just totally speechless by the end. This film is so grand and epic and tries to say so much during that colossal runtime and I swear to God it manages to say it all with the most profound eloquence that I’m begging for more of it. It totally flows with cinematic energy throughout which is hard to do in a film of this length as well.
Not unlike The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance there’s a town hall sequence (very American rural small town) set in Heaven’s Gate where all the townspeople get together and discuss the big hit list created by the landowners with all the names of those “anarchists” and “thieves”, meaning the immigrants, they want dead. John Ford’s film also features a scene at a town hall where the poor townsfolk discuss how to resist the wealthy landowners at the statehood convention in that film so this is Cimino sort of putting an even darker spin on Ford.
– The acoustic score is actually really nice; at first I was left wanting something a little more maximalist (I had seen William Wyler’s The Big Country, another epic Western, the day before and anyone who’s seen that film knows the score by Jerome Moross is an absolute whopper) but as the 4 hours rolled on and on I really liked its minimalism which gives counterbalance to the epic scale of the photography and the portrait of America Cimino aims to capture.
– It’s less realist than The Deer Hunter what with the opening at the steelworks (clearly a lower-class Ken Loach or Mike Leigh sort of feel) being replaced by Kristofferson’s and Hurt’s Harvard graduation and the deep urgency of the Vietnam War in the minds of audiences (mirroring WW2 in the postwar Italian films), not to mention the simply devastating depiction of the war, being replaced by a story about poor immigrants from Eastern Europe battling fabulously wealthy landowners who want to massacre them all with carte blanche from the President himself. This is not a complaint, the wild background of the story is actually something I like and it adds character to the film.
– I’m pretty certain Walken’s death scene gets paid homage to in John Marston’s death at the end of Red Dead Redemption.
– There is one flaw in the film worth mentioning – there’s one useless title card introducing us to a town, where we never get any other title cards for any other towns in the rest of the film (we do get ones to tell us about the decades-long timespan starting out in 1870 at Harvard, then 1890 in Wyoming and 1903 in Rhode Island at the end but that’s different and actually has a purpose; with this title card we’re still in the 1890 Wyoming segment), the name of the town isn’t even important for any reason, and the signpost with the town’s name is diegetically within the same shot as the non-diegetic title card making it even more useless.
– If I did have to pin another flaw on the film it would be John Hurt. He’s introduced alongside Kristofferson in the opening sequence at Harvard and then happens to be the one who informs him of the landowners’ scheme in the first place (he’s a landowner in Wyoming now himself and at the meeting where they talk about it), and after being a big part of the first hour he mostly drops off for the next 2 ½ until we find out he throws in with the landowners anyway (sort of; he just sort of drinks whiskey constantly standing in the background getting used as some kind of comic relief). It’s just a missed opportunity for an actor of his caliber.
– The lighting in the film is truly unreal – generally done with either natural light coming in through the windows or oil lamps sort of in the same way with Barry Lyndon and candles (and of course plenty of window sunlight on top of that). Countless interior scenes in the film have this beautiful sort of burnt gold hue to them like you might see in a Rembrandt van Rijn piece and clearly for many of the exterior sequences Cimino was obsessed with topping Malick’s aesthetic in Days of Heaven; just absolutely beautiful and all the natural lighting gives the film such an organic, alive feel to an extent most other films can’t reach. Vilmos Zsigmond is and always will be one of our great directors of photography and this may be his best work.
– The performances are exceptional as well. Isabelle Huppert probably shines the most of anyone actually as the landowning woman from Quebec who wears colorful clothes, loves who she wants, and is the object of everyone’s attention over the course of the film, particularly Kristofferson and Walken; she has a great scene with Walken after he asks her to marry him and they drive off (oh, those grassy landscapes they pass by in their horse and buggy…) to his log cabin and there begins a wonderful silent sequence as we alternate between closeups of the two of them completely soaked in magic hour sunlight as they speak with their eyes and faces – she is the heart and soul of the film and she may not be Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar in pure fire underneath the hood or have the fast-talking skills of the ideal of the Hawksian woman but she proves neither, nor even being an American, are requirements for the checklist to be the female center of a Western. Behind her there’s an argument probably for either Kris Kristofferson or Christopher Walken as giving the second-best performance in the film. Walken has a great opening; we’re at the house of some Russian immigrants who had been stealing cattle and we watch a shadowy figure walk up behind a tarp one of them is hiding behind and after the guy threatens him with a knife, we go boom, shotgun blast through the tarp as we see Walken on the other side before he walks off (very punny). I’m admittedly divided on how much the more sympathetic character arc he talks throughout most of the rest of his screentime (we do get a lot of time to experience it though which is very nice) works considering the violent, Lee Marvin in Point Blank / Anton Chigurh-esque introduction he gets and I feel pretty good that he is definitely stronger in The Deer Hunter but still this is a great opportunity for him to show off, especially in the big scene where the landowners besiege his house after he splits with them (he starts out working for them and gets increasingly disillusioned with their actions over the course of the runtime) but I still think he executes a riveting performance as the tertiary component of the love triangle at the film’s center. Kristofferson is the other arguable candidate for the second-best performance and perhaps you could even make an argument for his being #1 as I think about his work in the film to write this note here. His portrayal of the traditional Western hero character is a far cry from the giant screen presence macho men made prominent by the likes of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood; he’s closer to that sort of intersection between the external hardened masculinity of a Jean Gabin (who could be sensitive himself absolutely) and the softer internal sensitivity you would see in the early method actors like Montgomery Clift or Marlon Brando that was perhaps best encapsulated by the screen persona of Robert Mitchum in all the actors that ever made the cinema great, and I’m not saying Kristofferson is at the level of any of the actors I just mentioned, because he isn’t, but that’s the archetype he exemplifies here and he does a strong job of being the film’s closest thing to a leading man, even if I do think I’d probably have to say Robert De Niro gives the best single performance in a Cimino film in The Deer Hunter. Maybe I’m underrating him a little actually since whenever I think of his work here I can’t think of anything negative to say about him, he comes off really strong here especially in the ending in Rhode Island in 1903 where he doesn’t say anything and acts entirely with his body movement and that handsome face of his that exposes so much pain and regret and agonizing reminiscence about the failures he left behind in the past but still cannot escape.
– Another flaw, even if it far from kills the film, is that at one point Walken barges into Waterston’s tent at his mercenary camp and just blows the head off a guy who had just raped Huppert and none of the other mercenaries around the tent who would have heard it try to investigate the gun blast.
– About the Huppert rape scene, I wasn’t going to talk about it at first because of the content of it but it is wonderfully epic how Kristofferson saves her; he swings down from the roof and slits the throats of one of the mercenaries as the camera is staring out through a window obstructing the frame and then he barges in through the front door and in the same instant blasts almost everybody to pieces like the scene where Jamie Foxx kills the slave catchers in Django Unchained (with the guy in the bathtub who gets his dick blown off) and at the very end of the sequence we get almost the exact same shot as the one at the opening of Inglourious Basterds where Waltz tries to hit young Shoshanna and misses, but here with Kristofferson and the mercenary Walken killed at Waterston’s camp not long afterward.
– I actually do think Cimino was inspired by Point Blank a little; at 187 minutes when Kristofferson finally gets his act together and joins the immigrants in their fight against the landowners we get a magnificent low angle shot as he walks outside of his inn like the LAX sequence in Point Blank especially emphasizing his legs in the frame and his footsteps which pound into our ears like Marvin’s steps in the sequence I’m referring to in Boorman’s film.
– I’m not sure what it means – probably nothing to be honest and I’m just trying to find some meaning to make some sense of it – but Isabelle Huppert spends an unexpectedly large portion of her screentime without clothes.
– Most viewers and critics complain about the film being unbearably slow but I was glued to the screen for every second of the watch and I did not feel the colossal runtime at all; the same happened when I watched Once Upon a Time in America, Lawrence of Arabia, and A Brighter Summer Day (I remember watching Werckmeister Harmonies a few days after ABSD and feeling like Tarr’s film was so much longer than Yang’s even though it was 90 minutes shorter… if this comes off as me insulting Tarr I have WH as the #36 film of all-time so I don’t mean for it to appear that way but I just thought it was pretty funny how Tarr’s film felt slower to me than Yang’s despite the significant disparity in runtime).
– Finally at about 166 minutes we actually get some big battles starting off with the shootout at Walken’s cabin. It’s amazing. Waterston and his hired guns assemble all around the small cabin with only Walken and another guy in there and begin firing on it from all sides like it’s a firing range. The other guy in the house dies almost immediately but Walken is able to withstand for a while and Cimino STILL uses that burnt sandy natural light aesthetic inside the house as he tries to fight back and eventually we get some of the mercenaries pushing a burning wagon up to the house destroying it. This set piece is remarkably epic despite the small setting whilst also being distressingly claustrophobic at the same time as the fire increasingly surrounds us within the house. After this sequence at Walken’s house we get the first big battle as all the angry townspeople ride out to surround the mercenary camp in a sort of firing circle as they ride around the camp on their horses and carriages and a vicious exchange of gunfire comes to be. You best believe we’ve got quick cutting, handheld shaky cam, intense closeups alongside wide shots of the whole battlefield, loud sounds of gunfire and stampeding horses all kicking up dust enveloping the entire frame. This scene is as intense as just about any war, Western, or crime film you can think of, and while I don’t think it’s the greatest of all time I definitely think it’s one of the most epic battle scenes in any film not called Heat or The Wild Bunch.
– After regrouping following the first battle to reorganize their forces, the townspeople return to the mercenary camp for a second round Cimino somehow manages to make the final climactic fight even better than the previous one. This scene goes on for 10 minutes straight and features the townspeople hiding behind armored carts as they push increasingly closer to the wagon fort constructed by Waterston’s men, and sure enough it is shot during that magic old hour. We get harsh, claustrophobic closeups of the fighters surrounded by their fortifications and as the smoke rises it’s nearly impossible to see beyond whatever’s immediately in front of the camera. We get massive explosions from dynamite thrown both ways, widespread casualties and end up far from sweet victory. Nobody knows what to do now after allowing themselves to be debased to such a level of mass killing and the mood is perfectly set after the battle as one woman just opts to blow her brains out in front of Bridges (it’s completely muted with just the score playing into our ears) in a great little moment and the readily-apparent change in composition as the heavy cluttering of the frames preceding the fight give way to only the negative space that remains.
I do feel like I’ve talked about it before but one of the main reason this film is criticized is because of the fantastic nature of the story, about a bunch of Harvard-educated landowners battling by gun and dynamite a horde of immigrants from Eastern Europe who can hardly speak English, in Wyoming of all places. This… is actually fine. Cimino manages, despite the differing origins of all the characters, their appearances (clothing is what I mean), their accents, their social positions, and even their side of choice in this war to make them all feel, really, like Americans. There’s no overt overaccentuation of some qualities that might make them appear foreign to our eyes which connects back to The Deer Hunter with our Russian-American characters there not being defined by any particularly great connection to Russian culture – they’re Americans through and through.
I know I talked earlier about how films are not about story, and when I say that I don’t mean to imply that narrative deserves absolutely no attention in cinematic analysis, far from that but when you’re watching a film the first thing you should be considering is what you’re looking at far before “Is this a great story?” and in this case I actually do think Heaven’s Gate’s story is fine and not with too many major blemishes.. Obviously some of my favorite directors like Alain Resnais or Terrence Malick especially are famous for their manipulation of narrative as one of their directorial trademarks but I ask any one of you reading to check through Drake’s Top 50-100 directors list and think about how many of those directors you enjoy for their film’s stories more than anything else… and then get back to me.
– Largely wordless ending that reminded me a little of the opening 10 minutes of L’Eclisse. This is the ending of Bicycle Thieves, La Dolce Vita, Nostalghia, The Third Man, Werckmeister Harmonies or Rocco and His Brothers – the final shot just of Kristofferson smoking alone on the yacht is both a formal atom bomb and emotionally heartrending after all the events and all his efforts throughout the entire previous 3 ½ hours of the film.
– I’m not sure of how much more there is for me to say about this film. Obviously there is some American Revolution no taxation without representation stuff going on here with Waterston being “the representative of the US government and the President” as he proudly declares himself much alike how redcoat generals considered themselves representatives of the King in the Thirteen Colonies and there is also some criticism of like big business lobbying as the US Army generally shows up to reimburse Waterston whenever he finds himself on the back foot here. Like so many directors of his time, Cimino clearly had the ambition and self-obsession of the likes of Orson Welles with a creative mind that’s not as far off (but still not quite on that plane) as most would say and he seemed obsessed with trying to create the Great American Film with his works largely being about immigrants who have managed to integrate into American society but are still often looked down upon by figures of authority due to preconceptions about their origins, probably not too dissimilar with how Cimino felt about dealing with producers if you read just about anything about him. I don’t intend for this review to come off as endorsing his hefty expansion of the original budget projections and I think he could have made the film for less whilst still preserving the greatness but truly the fault lay with the critics who really rated the film more on the lengthy stories of Cimino’s conflicts with studio heads than any characteristics of the film itself, and while I’ll admit I haven’t seen (and don’t think I ever will) the supposedly hideous early versions of the film that were screened originally that does not absolve their miss here.
– I actually think this is a far stronger than The Deer Hunter (at present #176 of all films to me) currently which makes me feel I should revisit that film as soon as possible
– A masterpiece
Recently watched The Long Good Friday (1980) and Roeg’s Performance (1970)
What are some other good British gangster movies from the 70s or 80s?
@James Trapp- “Get Carter” with Michael Caine is strong
@Drake – thanks, I’ll check it out
@James Trapp- some of these are a stretch calling them “British”- but hey https://www.vulture.com/article/best-british-crime-movies.html
@Drake – thanks, watching “Get Carter” right now, I’ve seen a few of these in the article and enjoyed so solid list.
It’s funny each cinema has a distinct style of gangster film; American, French, British, Japanese, etc. British ones seem to be more influenced by realism, they are gritty with dry humor
@Drake – enjoyed Get Carter, nothing really new or groundbreaking but fun and entertaining for sure, plus great performance from Caine
@James Trapp- Agreed on all three points here
In general do you think that Cathy Moriarty gives either 2nd Or 3rd best performance of the year?
I find Nicholson’s performance flawed at times so I’d say it comes down to Pesci or Moriarty as the 2nd best. I’ll go with Moriarty.
Hi, Drake. What did you think of Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes? I wasn’t expecting much and was pleasantly surprised.
@Pedro- Yes, obviously not near the top of the list when talking about Bergman’s body of work- but it was added to the archives.
@Drake-Have you given any thought to mentioning Isabelle Huppert or Kris Kristofferson for their work in Heaven’s Gate? Sure the film is not one of the best of the year because of performances but I thought both of them were very good. Sure I can imagine many actors playing the Kristofferson role for most of the film but I thought his scene at the end of the film in a yacht in Rhode Island was quite potent. When he emotes his pain without a single word.
@Malith- I think they both fall short of a mention for 1980
@Drake-Who do you think gives the best performance in Heaven’s Gate? Actually for me I would pick John Hurt as the 3rd best. Walken isn’t bad. But his look didn’t really suit the character he was playing. And my god that moustache was ridiculous. I couldn’t recognize Jeff Bridges in this movie at all. Although he did have a substantial role.
@Malith- Yeah Hurt is a fine choice, Walken, or Sam Waterston is menacing enough.
I don’t understand why you don’t have Bad Timing as one of the most underrated films of 1980. It literally has only a 46 rating on rotten tomatoes and isn’t in the TSPDT top 1000 either.