Heaven's Gate

David Letterman was doing a bit long ago. They had new state flags. The one for Wyoming was a map of the state with a little picture of every person who lived there.

More recently, there was an ambitious young woman who thought that becoming Miss America would be her key to success. She moved to Wyoming and it worked. The population was so small and there was so little competition that she became Miss Wyoming and was first runner-up in the Miss America pageant.

So why are there so many people in Heaven's Gate? Cheyenne looks like New York or Hong Kong, packed with people, hundreds of extras all in costume bustling around. 

The movie was a critical and commercial failure when it came out, but I've heard that people are reassessing it. It's about the Johnson County War in 1892. It's pretty slow. Starts with the a few of the middle aged stars playing college boys graduating from Harvard twenty years earlier. Includes a big scene of a large number of people waltzing in a large open area. It looked impressive, but where was the music coming from and how they could hear it out there? I don't think it would work now with modern amplification.

It's a long movie, 3 hours and 37 minutes. Critics hated it, but some of the attacks on it were for things that were historically accurate. Roger Ebert thought it was ridiculous that a guy who wrote a last note before being killed while trapped in a burning cabin signed it with his full name. But that happened. If you're about to be murdered and you write a note that might be used as evidence, you probably should sign your full name.

Right-wing talk show host Michael Medved and his less-successful half-brother Harry attacked the movie as anti-American because, when the cavalry arrives in the end, it's to save the villains. This, too, was historically accurate.

The movie cost a fortune, $40 million, equal to $140 million in todays dollars. It looked great, but Michael Cimino was no David Lean. It wasn't Lawrence of Arabia. It wasn't gripping. It was long and it seemed long.

The Lone Ranger cost $215 million and The Wild Wild West cost $170 million, so even adjusting for inflation it wasn't the most expensive western ever made.

Like The Lone Ranger, Europeans liked Heaven's Gate better than Americans. I've never understood why westerns are so popular outside the U.S. Stalin liked them and the Dalai Lama still says John Wayne is his favorite actor.

I kept trying to picture it as a Werner Herzog movie.

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