L'Italo-Americano

italoamericano-digital-9-29-2016

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THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2016 www.italoamericano.org 13 L'Italo-Americano T he great director Michael Cimino passed away this July, twenty years after the release of his seventh and last film. Even though his name will probably be forever linked to his 1978 masterpiece, The Deer Hunter, it is now time for every- one to finally dispel the frequent assertion that Cimino was just a "one-shot director", after all. The irony in such claim should be evident to anyone familiar with that film. But in case it weren't enough, our aim is to proclaim Cimino's many-sided greatness by also looking at the relation- ship with his own Italian American roots. Let's start this appreciation of the late director straight away by pointing out that we will not refrain from mentioning the less successful, most controversial moments of Cimino's career. In fact, our starting point will be provided precisely by a revalua- tion of this author's greatest fail- ure, his epic Western Heaven's Gate (1980). Long since recon- sidered as a "cursed" cult movie by the European public (but still met with suspicion in the United States due to its political con- SIMONE SANNIO tent), this film is currently being shown at several cinemas throughout Italy, where it has been finally presented in its 216- minute director's cut thanks to the efforts of the Cineteca di Bologna. Inspired by the episodes of the Johnson County War (a vio- lent dispute between landlords and European immigrants that took place in Wyoming in the 1890s), upon its release Heaven's Gate became notorious for being one of the biggest box office flops of all times, having nearly caused the United Artist studio to go bankrupt; on top of that, it soon came to be known as one of the worst movies ever made. But the truth is that this film is proba- bly as good as The Deer Hunter, as anyone who enjoyed the restored full-length version on the big screen might testify: it is really hard to equal the ever-last- ing beauty of such scenes as the opening Harvard graduation cer- emony or the mind-blowing roller skate dance. At the same time, it is hard not to notice how Cimino quite obviously claimed here that some of the immigrants who came to America to found their Promised Land were, in fact, kept outside the "gates of Heaven". In judging the director's ideology, though, we should never forget that – whereas the film focuses on immigrants from Eastern Europe – its author surely has mediated his feelings through the lens of his own ethnic ancestry, going back to the hardships of the Italian American immigration experience: hence why the immi- gration theme is first introduced in Heaven's Gate by an immi- grant being shot down after hav- ing identified himself as "Michael", an obvious reference to Cimino's own name. In fact, if we look closer, we may notice that a similar take on immigration, though certainly more veiled, is also present in the much celebrated The Deer Hunter: let alone the well-known Russian roulette sequences in Vietnam, most of the film focuses on Slavic immigrants working in the Pennsylvania steel mills and their community's gradual assim- ilation into mainstream America. If there is a clear way in which Cimino self-identifies with the immigrants' viewpoint, this time it is by casting in their roles prominent Italian American actors such as John Cazale and especially Robert De Niro. However it may be, the fact remains that – alongside other notable directors which estab- lished their reputation during the New Hollywood era, most notably Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma – Cimino is one of the best exam- ples of how Italian Americans paved their own way to the pearly gates of America by managing to shape the culture of the country as a whole. Nonetheless, in enter- ing the American mainstream, the author did not necessarily renounce his outsider, fringe point of view on the society he lived in: for example, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), Cimino's first film, is undoubtedly American to the bone, and yet critic Ben Lawton once found that its main charac- ter, played by Clint Eastwood, has the same sort of "self-made morality" as the men in Sergio Leone's Italian Spaghetti Westerns (but also – we may add – as the characters in Coppola's The Godfather). All in all, it may be possible to watch each of Cimino's films, even the most distant from ethnic motifs, as if his treatment of any immigrant experience relates to the author's own ancestry. The action movie Year of the Dragon (1985), in this respect, is not only the story of a cop who tries to overcome some Chinese gang- sters devastating New York's Chinatown, but also a sort of Asian American retelling of The Godfather. A third-generation Italian American whose family had come from Sicily, Cimino had never dealt explicitly with Italian American themes until he direct- ed the controversial The Sicilian (1987). This film, based on a novel by Mario Puzo which is a follow-up to The Godfather, focuses on the story of Salvatore Giuliano, a famous Sicilian ban- dit (here represented in an unproblematic Robin Hoodesque attitude) who had a dream of making Sicily a part of the United States. What Cimino had envi- sioned for himself in the develop- ment of this project was probably to reply Coppola's success and finally find the right frame to deal with his italoamericanità: as a matter of fact, he traveled directly to Sicily for the filming and even chose the Italian American John Turturro for the role of Giuliano's best friend. But no matter what, in the end The Sicilian became a commercial failure. And yet – however flawed this film may seem today – its allegorical meaning nonetheless serves as a possible starting point for every- one who is willing to reconsider, without further prejudice, the works of a great director of Italian descent. LIFE PEOPLE MOVIES MUSIC BOOKS Michael Cimino won Oscars for director and best picture for the powerful 1978 Vietnam War drama The Deer Hunter. Image: Ronald Grant Archive A Farewell to Michael Cimino: Remembering his Italoamericanità

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