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Posted: **Thu Aug 16, 2012 7:36 pm**

MichaelB wrote: The film was never released on UK DVD, but it had a pan-and-scan VHS release in 1986, and the BBFC website confirms that both the theatrical and video versions were cut, the video version by over a minute. No reason is given, but animal cruelty is overwhelmingly likely: even in the James Ferman era, the BBFC was generally reluctant to cut films by important Oscar-winning directors unless they were legally problematic.

There's a cockfight scene missing in the UK. I'm told that it was in the first UK showing of the full version at the NFT by people who were there, but it was missing when I saw it in 1987, even though the version I saw had not been submitted to the BBFC - presumably taken out on legal advice.

The showing of the full version that I saw was in 70mm at what was then the largest of the two screens at the ABC Shaftesbury Avenue (now the four-screen Odeon Covent Garden) and it amounted to a private showing. Someone had hired the cinema for a Sunday morning showing, had hired the print and advertised the screening of a film not then otherwise available in that form. Since the showing sold out, that person must have made a profit.

There was some damage to the print, which in one place caused a big unintentional laugh. A splice removed someone's line of dialogue, which was unfortunate as the next (audible) line was "What did you say?"

That was twenty-five years ago, and I remember sequences and shots to this day, so the film must have had quite an impact as I've not seen it again since. Having said that, I caught a little of the first UK TV screening on the BBC2 Film Club and noticed that the sound mix had been tweaked: Kristofferson's words when he first arrives were more audible.

Posted: **Thu Aug 16, 2012 8:03 pm**

Cold Bishop wrote:I don't think there's much reason to watch the "Love Conquers All" version of Brazil

The reason to watch that version is the commentary, which is one of the most revealing pieces of analysis in the entire collection. It's a fantastic masterclass in how subtleties of editing (a different take, a different shot order, trimming a second or two from a particular shot) can completely change the meaning of a film.

Posted: **Thu Aug 16, 2012 10:03 pm**

GaryC wrote:
MichaelB wrote: That was twenty-five years ago, and I remember sequences and shots to this day, so the film must have had quite an impact as I've not seen it again since. Having said that, I caught a little of the first UK TV screening on the BBC2 Film Club and noticed that the sound mix had been tweaked: Kristofferson's words when he first arrives were more audible.

I was wondering whether the sound issues have been sorted out on this release. There's another scene where the sound of a train practically drowns out the dialogue.

Posted: **Thu Aug 16, 2012 11:02 pm**

Cold Bishop wrote:The short version was released in France (poor saps... they stump for the film, and then they're stuck with the butchered cut). If it's not OOP, one could bite the bullet and track it down.

I appreciate your mentioning of this as if you had not I likely wouldn't have thought to look for it here.

Posted: **Fri Aug 17, 2012 6:24 am**

GaryC wrote:That was twenty-five years ago, and I remember sequences and shots to this day...

Great story Gary, many thanks...

I'm glad the sound mix was mentioned because the current MGM DVD is problematic in this regard, and at times the dialogue is barely comprehensible. I'm sure Criterion will do their usual stellar job but any Blu-Ray would surely have its work cut out for it with those dusty visual textures and Vilmos Zsigmond's particular photographic style, that soft diffused lighting and use of filters (or flashing as Zsigmond calls it).

Posted: **Fri Aug 17, 2012 12:15 pm**

Lots of relevant discussion of this film in the Cimino thread, might be worth porting over/combining/moving?

Posted: **Fri Aug 17, 2012 3:43 pm**

MichaelB wrote:The film was never released on UK DVD

Really? I bought a copy of it from a high street retailer in Bristol a number of years ago (currently Head, formerly Zavvi, formerly Virgin Megastore - no idea which incarnation it was when I made the purchase).

Posted: **Fri Aug 17, 2012 4:15 pm**

Was it an actual UK edition, or a US import? I can't find any record of a legitimate UK release after the 1986 VHS edition.

Posted: **Fri Aug 17, 2012 7:21 pm**

A pan n' scan release of the shorter cut was available on VHS in the UK in the late 90s, I remember being amazed that it was advertised as a "Pan and Scan" on the sleeve.

Posted: **Fri Aug 17, 2012 10:03 pm**

MichaelB wrote:Was it an actual UK edition, or a US import? I can't find any record of a legitimate UK release after the 1986 VHS edition.

I remember seeing a Heaven's Gate DVD on the shelf of Easons (Irish newsagents, think WH Smith) but I think it was the German release (whose cover features the English title followed by the smaller fonted German title). I've seen a few examples of these stray imports from time to time. I checked the BBFC website and there's no record on a DVD submission, surely that's definitive ?

I honestly don't remember seeing the film in any shorter version. I'm sure the first time I saw the film was on a two-night screening on ITV, most likely in the late 80's/early 90's (but I could easily be confusing this with Leone's OUATIA). Was there a version of the film with added narration or is that a myth ?

Posted: **Fri Aug 17, 2012 11:25 pm**

MichaelB wrote:Was it an actual UK edition, or a US import? I can't find any record of a legitimate UK release after the 1986 VHS edition.

Just had a rummage to find it and you're right, it isn't a UK edition. It's Irish - no BBFC information, but an 18 from the Film Censor's Office, so it probably didn't strike me as foreign since a lot of UK DVDs carry the Irish film classification anyway.

Posted: **Sat Aug 18, 2012 11:51 am**

HJackson wrote:It's Irish - no BBFC information, but an 18 from the Film Censor's Office, so it probably didn't strike me as foreign since a lot of UK DVDs carry the Irish film classification anyway.

Ah okay, thanks for the footwork H. At the risk of banging on about a minor point, I'd say the DVD is probably European, all DVDs and Blu's sold in Ireland are by and large the same discs sold in the UK (right down to BBFC input), and simply get a perfunctory Irish Film Classification sticker (before these ratings were printed on, they appeared as stickers randomly slapped on to the sleeve and these uglies were a nightmare to remove). The same was true of VHS - I'd say 95% of tapes were of UK origin, (including the old Warners clamshell Heaven's Gate with matching Criterion sleeve) and as I understand it, many UK collectors scored rare pre-cert VHS tapes over here (I was still finding dusty, long forgotten copies of various DPP 39 films in video shops well into the 90's when I started collecting films).

Posted: **Sat Aug 18, 2012 1:50 pm**

Wes Moynihan wrote:Was there a version of the film with added narration or is that a myth ?

The shorter theatrical cut has both added narration and some added dialog. None of it was necessary or a particularly good idea.

Posted: **Sat Aug 18, 2012 5:58 pm**

domino harvey wrote:Lots of relevant discussion of this film in the Cimino thread, might be worth porting over/combining/moving?

Right you are, domino. I've moved over the relevant stuff, and there is indeed lots of now lots of good discussion of the film (much of it from seven years ago) in the first few pages of this thread. Anyone who hasn't seen the film and is dismissing it on basis of its reputation should definitely check out some of the impassioned defenses.

Posted: **Sun Aug 19, 2012 6:20 am**

Wes Moynihan wrote:I'm sure the first time I saw the film was on a two-night screening on ITV, most likely in the late 80's/early 90's (but I could easily be confusing this with Leone's OUATIA).

I think you are - that was OUATIA and it was Channel 4, not ITV. I saw that showing, having seen the film a few years earlier at the University Film Society. That showing was identical to that passed by the BBFC for the cinema - i.e. with one cut made, to the shot of a woman being threatened by having a gun pressed to her breast early on.

Heaven's Gate's first UK TV showing was on BBC2 in its full-length version in their Film Club slot. If I remember rightly it was panned and scanned (this was before their letterboxed showing of Last Year at Marienbad, after which they showed some Scope films in OAR, I think all of them subtitled ones). I'd only just watched it in 70mm, so only watched bits of it, so can't comment as to whether the cockfight scene was in it or not.

Posted: **Sat Aug 25, 2012 5:47 pm**

Here is Glenn Erickson on Lee Kline's AMIA presentation (nothing, I think, that we didn't already know):

Then came Lee Klein of the Criterion Collection, who had a lot to say about Criterion's new restoration of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate. It's the full long original director's cut with color and sound supervised by Cimino. Even Cimino couldn't account for the fact that the only film elements for the long version had been color-timed very brown and red (previous MGM revival prints were overseen by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond) so wanted to go back to his idea of what the color should be. The problem is that accessing the original negative wasn't an option. In the panic after the disastrous premiere UA had ordered Cimino to drastically cut the movie: the original negative had been conformed to that shorter cut. After checking out some useless 70mm prints, Kline had the entire nearly four-hour movie reconstituted in 2K from color separations -- 23 reels of film, times three -- and timed with Cimino's input. We were shown samples of the old and new color and they're like night and day. Heaven's Gate will once again look like a 'Big Sky' western.

The 6-track sound master was located, but one of the tracks had some distortion so it had to be worked over very carefully. No separate stems existed to do a swap or replace a track -- dialogue isn't just in the center speaker but spread across all of the front speakers. They attacked the track with new software instead. Kline said that Michael Cimino admitted that he had done wrong by judging the audio in the big state-of-the-art mixing room at MGM, where you can hear everything. He should have listened to some mix-downs and optical tracks in ordinary theaters. This is why it is impossible to make out important dialogue in noisy street and action scenes. Actor Richard Masur speaks with a thick accent, which doesn't help either.

What else? Cimino wanted the intermission taken out so that was done ... in a movie that long it's a nice idea to have an official kidney break. And I always thought that the intermission break for Heaven's Gate packed a (needed) dramatic impact, too. The Heaven's Gate BD is due out on November 20.

Posted: **Sat Aug 25, 2012 6:16 pm**

Glenn Erickson wrote:Kline said that Michael Cimino admitted that he had done wrong by judging the audio in the big state-of-the-art mixing room at MGM, where you can hear everything. He should have listened to some mix-downs and optical tracks in ordinary theaters.

This was why Stanley Kubrick continued releasing his films in mono long after stereo became the expected norm - he just didn't trust cinemas to get it right. I remember the original VHS of Full Metal Jacket boasting "Hi-fi Mono Sound", and doing a momentary double take - by 1987, that was pretty much unheard of for a major label release of a new film.

Posted: **Sat Aug 25, 2012 6:26 pm**

Yeah, John Kirk talked about all of this during a Block Cinema (Evanston) Q&A for The Night of the Hunter back in 2005 or so. This film was brought up, and he talked about the same exact color timing and sound mix issues and why they happened, and everything was fixed for the theatrical re-issue around then.

Posted: **Sat Sep 15, 2012 9:51 pm**

It appears the "Johnson County War" feature has disappeared.

Posted: **Sat Sep 15, 2012 10:13 pm**

The Narrator Returns wrote:It appears the "Johnson County War" feature has disappeared.

Yikes. For a film that bankrupt a studio and made Hollywood what it is today, you'd think Criterion would issue a comprehensive special edition exploring all aspects of the film. I understand that with Cimino approving the edition, it's unlikely to explore the film's harsh critical reaction. However, this edition still feels rather light.

Posted: **Mon Sep 24, 2012 6:28 pm**

Just noticed the list price for this is $49.99! I know it comes on 2 discs, but considering the lack of extras - even "Johnson County War" is gone now - the high list price is surprising.

Posted: **Mon Sep 24, 2012 6:44 pm**

RobertAltman wrote:Just noticed the list price for this is $49.99! I know it comes on 2 discs, but considering the lack of extras - even "Johnson County War" is gone now - the high list price is surprising.

Perhaps it'll be a digi-pack? Night of the Hunter is 49.95 MSRP.

Posted: **Mon Sep 24, 2012 6:49 pm**

Drucker wrote:
RobertAltman wrote:Just noticed the list price for this is $49.99! I know it comes on 2 discs, but considering the lack of extras - even "Johnson County War" is gone now - the high list price is surprising.
Perhaps it'll be a digi-pack? Night of the Hunter is 49.95 MSRP.

Packaging has nothing to do with price w/r/t Criterion. The reason that these films are priced the way they are is because there is enough content to warrant two full Blu-ray discs of content.

Posted: **Sat Nov 03, 2012 7:49 am**

blu-ray.com

The difference between this and the version available on Netflix is like night and day.

Posted: **Sat Nov 03, 2012 8:34 am**

Bluray.com

Edit
Three years later, and I finally catch that I totally double posted the review! Whoops! Also finally bought this movie today, so uhh, people re-reading this thread might get a laugh!

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