Heaven’s Gate (1980) Review
Heaven's Gate (1980) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Cimino shot two hundred and twenty hours of film for forty-four million dollars, took three and a half million at the box office, and ended the era that…
Actor: Joseph Cotten
Joseph Cotten came from Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre and appeared in Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey into Fear, which is a debut sequence few actors have matched.
Shadow of a Doubt is his best performance, playing Hitchcock’s Uncle Charlie, a serial killer whose charm is entirely convincing and whose speech about widows is genuinely chilling.
The Third Man gives him a pulp novelist who is out of his depth for the entire film and never understands it, which is a difficult thing to play sympathetically.
He worked steadily for decades afterward in progressively lesser material and remained close to Welles throughout.
