1974 - THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT, a good road film

 Probably Michael Cimino's best film.  It's certainly one of his more restrained films without the elephantiasis that set it on his later films.  Cimino wrote the screenplay and at one point Clint Eastwood was going to direct the film.  Instead Eastwood let Cimino direct but closely supervised Cimino to keep him on schedule and under budget.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was shot on location at some very impressive Big Sky locations.This film is known as a "road' picture, the characters are pretty much on the run for the entire length of the film.

The compact cast includes character actor George Kennedy, Eastwood crony Geoffrey Lewis and in a real scene stealing performance, Jeff Bridges  In fact Bridges was such a scene stealer that he supposedly annoyed movie star Clint Eastwood.

 

The film has lots of action and some good comedy.  It runs 115 minutes.

1980 - HEAVEN'S GATE-The film that I can't finish

Looking over one of my favorite film websites this week, Jeffrey Welles's "Hollywood Elsewhere". Welles ran a brief article about the death of Steven Bach a United Artists executive who got caught up in the fiasco of Heaven's Gate.  In 1980 Heaven's Gate was THE most expensive film ever produced by a Hollywood studio at a cost of 40 million dollars. Today that seems almost like pocket change for a typical Hollywood popcorn movie.

One of the most interesting things about Welles's article is the you tube link to a documentary about the film in 8 parts.  The documentary talks to many of the principles involved in the making of the film, and recounts the obsessiveness of the director Michael Cimino in making the film. Almost everyone in the film discusses the incredible attention to detail and the amount of work that goes into the film, but no one in the film mentions the outrageously poor quality of the finished film.

Another film for serious insomnia sufferers like just about any Andrei Tarkovsky film. The photography is amazing although it goes pretty heavy on the sepia lens filter at times. The production design is something to see, the Montana locations are magnificent.  The major problems with the film were the acting and the story.

Kris Kristofferson, was the lead in the film, and his style of underacting was poorly suited for a film that was shooting for an epic scope. He did achieve at least one effect, he helped me fall asleep with his relentless mumbling. Isabelle Huppert seems to have been cast as the female lead because she was willing to run around topless for the director for no particular reason.  Christopher Walken probably gave the best performance in the film, but his character was such an underdeveloped and contradictory mess by the time he died it was difficult to figure out what exactly his role in the story was supposed to be,  good guy or bad guy.

If the acting didn't completely kill Heaven's Gate, the horrible script finished the job.   This was an anti-western made at a time when westerns were a dead art form. The story is a simple one, it's cattle barons versus the sod busters. Viewing it, requires sitting through lots of incredibly dull exposition and dialog, real film killers. The film got an R rating. The nudity and the violence also helped to doom it from ever being seen by a wide audience. Someone should have realized that before they released it.

Michael Cimino who wanted to be an epic film maker like David Lean had only realized part of his vision, he was an epic hack.  Incredibly this film has actually found some film scholars who think it's a masterpiece.  They clearly haven't watched it in awhile. 

228 minutes!