Harbour Highlights: Heaven’s Gate (in Memory of David Titt)

Name: Harbour Highlights: Heaven’s Gate (in Memory of David Titt)
Start: 2024-07-28T12:00:00+01:00
Location: Harbour Lights

Schedule

Sun Jul 28 2024 at 12:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Harbour Lights | Southampton, EN

“You're not my class, Canton, and you never will be. You'd have to die first and be born again.”
Welcome to Harbour Highlights, a series of cult and classic hits, handpicked by the staff of Harbour Lights. For this choice, we’re paying tribute to David, one of our most loyal customers from the very beginning who we recently lost, with a rare screening of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.
Focusing on a war between land barons and European immigrants in 1890s America and featuring a cast that includes Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Jeff Bridges and Isabelle Huppert, Heaven’s Gate is a true cinema epic and a passion project for Cimino following his success with 1978’s The Deer Hunter. However, a spiralling production, bad press and a hacked-down 148-minute version saw it receive scathing reactions upon its original release in 1981 and become such a notorious bomb that some see it as a point where the time of auteur-driven cinema was replaced by a more studio-driven era.
Reedited to its full 217-minute version, the film has been critically reassessed over the years and now stands as a true American classic with BBC Culture ranking it as one of the 100th greatest American films of all time in 2015. An incredibly passionate and knowledgeable film fan, David would happily talk to the staff of Harbour Lights about his love of cinema, with this film often coming up as one he’d like to see as it was intended on the big screen. We can’t think of a better tribute to his memory than to share one of his favourite films for others to discover.