WHEN Kris Kristofferson left us at the age of 88 earlier this week, most of the media coverage afforded to the great man focused on his remarkable musical career. With a CV boasting some of the greatest songs ever written, that’s fair enough, but it’s worth remembering his long and often magical career in film alongside the multitude of Sunday Mornings Coming Down and Help Me Make It Through The Nights that he gave us.
As an actor, that craggy visage and moody everyman persona saw him grace everything from big screen epics like A Star Is Born (1976) to Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist Western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). He starred in low-key Scorsese offerings like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and flashy Hollywood franchise favourites like the Blade trilogy.
As an actor, he could shift from populist pot boilers to arty character studies with impressive ease. A charismatic on-screen presence, he made cult classics like Cisco Pike (1972) and the wild and wonderful Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (1974) and managed to elevate more crummy made-for-TV movies just by being there than probably he even remembered.
If I had to pick one film that showcases his big screen talents, though, I’d have to go for Heaven’s Gate from 1980. These days Michael Cimino’s sprawling Western is probably best remembered for bankrupting a studio and flopping at the box office on a spectacular scale (it was also the movie that robbed Kris of his A-lister status in Hollywood at the time), but I’m not having any of that.
For me, it’s actually a powerful, thoughtful study of the battles between land barons and European immigrants in 1890s Wyoming, with Kristofferson’s lead turn as the complex Sheriff James Averill hugely impressive in depth and delivery.
Starring alongside the likes of Christopher Walken, John Hurt and Jeff Bridges, Kristofferson holds his own impressively as the wealthy mayor of Johnson County, where a bloody range war is raging between the poor settlers and the well-to-do cattle barons of the area.
Unfairly dismissed at its time of release as a directionless, slow-moving mess of a movie, Heaven’s Gate is, in my eyes at least, a slow-burning delight in many ways. The Deer Hunter director Cimino delivers the film’s actually rather simple story with some very effective set-pieces, including a memorable early graduation sequence, a lively dance derby and an impressive climatic battle, and while it’s often quiet where most modern films are noisy and action-packed purely for the sake of it, Heaven’s Gate has a glacial quality and a sense of dusty authenticity that clearly influenced many a modern Western epic from Deadwood down.
Cimino’s film may have been tough going to make, with stories of the director’s megalomania passing into Hollywood legend, but it looks incredible, thanks in no small part to the vision of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.
Kristofferson shines throughout, proving that, given the right material, he could weave a truly magical spell on the big screen as well as in the recording studio.
