Michael Cimino: A true master

In a year that has taken David Bowie, Prince, Merle Haggard, Guy Clarke, Alan Rickman, Caroline Aherne, and Michael Herr, author of Dispatches, one of the great anti-war books, it might be a tad difficult to get the deserved recognition for film-maker Michael Cimino, who died in Los Angeles aged 77, on Saturday. 

He has been described as a great at a time of greatness in American and world cinema. His masterworks — The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate — are, if not unsurpassable, then certainly high-water marks of cinema.

Heaven’s Gate challenged the orthodoxy of its time — it was released 36 years ago — and was dismissed by American critics. A standing ovation greeted a restored print at the Venice Film Festival in 2012 and suggests that a better understanding of what is described as a Marxist Western has been achieved. Irrespective of what the critics thought or think the epic on the Johnson County War between impoverished immigrants and the cattle plutocrats determined to own everything is even more relevant today than it was in 1980.