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[New version still flawed By Victor Stanton When the movie Heaven‘s Gate had its disastrous first screen- ings in New York and Toronto last November, it was an ex- hausting " hours long. The re-edited version that is currently on view is a mere 2k, hours in length, and - for a lot of people, I suspect - still an ex- hausting experience. The picture, reportedly having cost between $36 and $40 million to make, has been both written and directed by Michael Cimino, winner of the best-director Oscar for 1978's The Deer Hunter. The failure of Heaven's Gate with its initial audiences was, for the most part, a reflection of Ciminu's excesses both as writer and director. His work on the movie over the last five months certainly has eradicated a great deal of the excessiveness, but it has not substantially improved the film. Cimino took as the basis for his screen story an incident which occurred in Johnson County, Wyoming, in 1892. The powerful Stock Growers' Association - cattle barons who disapproved of the influx of immigrant farmers and sheepmen into the territory - drew up a "hit list" of persons the association accused of being rustlers. Association members and gun- men they hired invaded Johnson county and, according to the Encyclopedia Americana, they killed only two persons before a sheriff's posse surrounded them. Soldiers promptly appeared on the scene and took the invaders away. Nine months later, a court action against the invaders ended with their dismissal "for lack of evidence“ In his screenplay, Cimino sug gests there was collusion among law enforcement agencies, the army and all levels of govern- ment - right up to the presidency - to support the extremist action of the Stock Growers" Association'? He acknowledges that many of the immigrants were in fact stealing small numbers of the association's cattle, and that others were accepting the stolen cattle in trade for goods and services. But the association's action. Cimino infers, was prompted more by personal greed than by any desire to bring criminals to justice. The basic incident could have served Cimino well if his objen tive was to make a parallel statement about contemporary American society. Certainly. two incidents which occurred just prior to the original release of Heaven's Gate - the success of a "hit list" against liberal senators in the U.S. elcc tion and the acquittal of Nazis and Klansmen who were filmed shooting down. in old-West style. a group of Communist protesters And on the more intimate level of personal relationships, Hear en's Gate suffers from a serious lack of clarity in character track- grounding and motivation. But Cimino's attempt to give the Johnson County incident all the epic trappings of the burning of Atlanta during the American Civil War scuttle both the mes- sage and the medium. _ served as timely support for such a statement. Cimino is unquestionably an artist trying to say something. That he has failed to make clear what he is trying to say is the result, perhaps, of his becoming too intensely subjective about the project and allowing his artistic vision to obscure his desire to communicate. Cimino the writer leaves all these inter-relationships annoy- ingly vague. and Cimino the director tends to make them dramatically pretotious. Heaven's Gate. )y the way, is the name of a roller-skating rink which, in the context of the movie, serves the immigrants as both a recreation centre and a town-hall-like meeting place. Perhaps too, flushed with the success of The Deer Hunter, he lost the perspective as to where his skills as a film-maker really lay. Despite the almost universal damning of Heaven's Gate by audiences and critics alike, it is by no means a movie totally without merit. The photography by Vilmos Zsigmond, Academy-Award win- ner for Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Cimino's cinema- tographer for The Deer Hunter, is breathtakingly magnificent. The original ethnic-flavored music by David Mansfield, who appears in the film as a roller- skating violinist. is superbly complementary and eminently listenable. Performances by Huppert, making her American film debut. and Walken are especially affect. ing, filled with emotional nuances and an appealing blend of vitality and humor. Other performances, unfortun- ately, range from adequate to lacking, although in most cases what's lacking is a well-defined character. Hurt, so brilliant in the title role of The Elephant Man, suffers most for the want of a character to portray. Heaven's Gate would certainly disappoint people expecting a traditional "western" approach to the story, and I suspect that even if it originally had been shorter and constructed with greater clarity, its "left-wing" social message would have been poorly received in this increas- ingly "right-wing" time. 'Dean to research 14th century music Dr. Gordon Greene, dean of music at Wil- frid Laurier Universi- ty, recently received. a Canada Council grant of $31,000 to complete his research and tram scription of priceless manuscripts of Nth century European songs and instrumental pieces. Christopher Walken is Nate Champion, the most dangerous guntighter in Johnson County, Wyoming, in Michael Cimino‘s Heaven's Gate. The grant. which covers a three-year period, does not im elude a salary for Dr. Greene but enables him to take two more trips to Europe and to employ an assistant for research purposes. He began work on the project in I965 and his research is now being published by 1iseatr Lyrv, a publishing Cirm vstablished in 1950 by banking heiress Louisi- Dyer of Monaco. (Dir sttau-Lyrv's purpose is to prekervv as much Nth century repertoire as possible Dr. Greene has made ll trips to Europe in the last 15 years, seek, ing out surviving ex- amples of music and transcribing them by hand for today's musi- cians to play or study. He cannot, unfortun- ately. bring his find- ings home but must make use of photo- graphs or microfilms which are stored in his office at Wilfrid Laurier University. "To make sure that everything is absolute ly'accurate you ultima- tely have to go back to the source," he said. "Sometimes you find that what looked like a note in microfilm is really a nyspeck or wormhole on the copy." There is one elvment that cannot be repro duced in modern form: calligraphy and arts work which make so many old manuscripts visual delights with their vibrant colors and gold Iearing. These, however. have provided him with clues about how ob- scure 501125 were meant to be per- formed. Retrieving these manuscripts has forced the Laurier dean to become both a detec- tive and diplomat. One such incident in 1977 led him to a monastery in Montserrat. Spain. where a valuable manuscript was dis, covered under strange circumstances, In the year 1509, a loo-year-old song book had been used as paid ding in the construction of a leather cover of a book, It had beep cut to size to fit the molding and was discovered when old bindings were being repaired by the monks. With careful removal and analysis, Dr. Greene and other scholars can now re- construct many parts of such damaged scores. The entire project, containing 24 volumes, will be _ completed by 1984 and the collection will likely stand as the most comprehensive gathering of 14th cen- tury music in the world. Dr. Greene is respon. sible for the completion of six volumes of French music in the series, For his efforts he receives no royal- ties. only a personal copy of each volume. But he said, “I have absolutely no regrets. There have been so many benefits you just can't put a price on it."