Westerns – Part 4 – Demise

The western died out in the early 1980s following the monumental disaster of Heaven’s Gate (1980). Not only did it bring a film studio to its knees financially but it made other studios extremely wary of investing in the genre. The underlying reasons though are not so much about the financial profligacy of the film [...]

Heaven’s Gate (1981) – Film Masterpiece or Mess?

I’ve always had a fascination for this film. I’m not quite sure whether it’s the sort of fascination you get when you stumble upon a car crash (a rubber-necking sort of fascination) or an admiration for what the film was striving for and, maybe, could have been. The facts and figures around Heaven’s Gate are [...]