Director Cimino attempts to lift the curse of Heaven's Gate

American film director Michael Cimino (AP)

It was the most reviled film of its era, blamed for the financial collapse of United Artists and the unravelling of the once glorious career of its Oscar-winning director, Michael Cimino. A spectacular box-office failure in the US that marked the end of the auteur-driven Hollywood film movement of the 1970s. The film's star Kris Kristofferson, then among Hollywood's most coveted leading men, found himself shunned overnight. Now, at the Venice Film Festival, it seems that Cimino's folie de grandeur Heaven's Gate (1980) may finally have been rehabilitated.

When Cimino walked on stage at the Sala Perla in Venice yesterday, he was introducing a restored 218-minute version of the epic western about the Johnson County War that many are predicting will force film history to be rewritten.

The restoration, which uses the 4K resolution standard, was undertaken by Criterion, a distribution company that specialises in the release of "important classic and contemporary films", and overseen by Cimino himself. He claims it is "even better" than the original print.

Now 73, Cimino cut a curious figure. He was frail but defiant as he remembered the savaging the film received 33 years ago. After the opening, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby quipped that watching the film was "like a forced, four-hour tour of one's living room". Legend has it that it was received so badly at the Toronto film festival that when the stars and Cimino returned to Hollywood, United Artists had to be bribed to pick them up at the airport because no one in the industry wanted to be seen with them. In panic, Cimino cut his own movie. Most audiences in the US saw a botched, shortened version of the film.

Although European critics have long praised the movie, it has always had a hostile reception in the US. Speaking in Venice, an emotional Cimino acknowledged that the drubbing he received in 1980 had left its scars. "You know, being infamous is not fun. It becomes a weird kind of occupation in and of itself."

Cimino paid tribute to the film's producer, Joann Carelli, and to his cast who, he said, had stayed loyal when everyone else deserted him. "Even when I was going through post-traumatic syndrome after the rejection of this film, she [Carelli] and Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert never wavered. They never doubted the work we'd done."

Carelli persuaded MGM to allow the film to be restored and brought on board Criterion. Initially, Cimino wanted nothing to do with the film that had brought him so much grief. When MGM had approved an earlier restoration in 2005, he refused to have anything to do with it. However, this time round, Carelli convinced him to "go back to work". Many theories have been advanced as to why Heaven's Gate was such a gargantuan flop. Some say Cimino was being punished for his hubris. He had won an Academy Award and huge praise for The Deer Hunter (1978). United Artists had therefore given him carte blanche to make Heaven's Gate.

He soared over budget and schedule. His set was infiltrated by a hostile reporter who wrote a piece suggesting that Cimino was behaving with an extravagance that made even Cecil B DeMille seem frugal.

Another theory is that the film's liberal politics counted against it. Cimino was dealing with the plight of immigrant workers out west and with the ruthless behaviour of the Wyoming cattle barons. That subject matter didn't play well in the early days of the Reagan era.

And it didn't help that United Artists poured so much into the movie that other film-makers suddenly found they couldn't get their films made.

Yesterday's screening looked magnificent. From the gilded opening scenes at Harvard, where Kristofferson, John Hurt and others from the "class of 1870" frolic and waltz to Strauss music, to the seething, dirty frontier town of Casper, Wyoming, the film has a level of detail and visual invention that recalls a lost tradition in Hollywood.

Perhaps the curse on Heaven's Gate will finally be lifted.