Face to Face

The East-West shift at the onset is varied by Cimino in Heaven's Gate, the tubercular professor (Gian Maria Volonté) leaves the Boston university and is next seen in Texas, tearing pages off a book and chucking them at a lizard. (The view from a frosted New England window yields to a blasting frontier sun before the opening titles.) "Keep your philosophy for someone else," snaps a lawman dragging the chained bandit (Tomás Milian), the outsider intervenes to get the prisoner a drink of water and is taken hostage in a runaway stagecoach. Thus the intellectual-primitive dialectic, complicated as the men shoot and theorize in a land where "it's difficult to distinguish the instinct for survival from the lust to acquire power." The making of political consciousness in the desert, a dazzling master class on ideology and genre by Sergio Sollima. Corrupt machinations in Purgatory City, debate between the Yankee who thinks replacing "slave" with "servant" constitutes a moral triumph and the plantation belle who knows words cannot change a system. Refuge in Puerto de Fuego, a ramshackle utopia for barefoot tomboys and geriatric desperados and assorted "ghosts of the past." While a burgeoning awareness leads the pistolero to rethink his approach to brutality, the scholar grows ruthless after a taste of dominance. ("Violence by masses of men is called history," he pontificates with revolver at a foe's neck.) A pendant to their dyad, the Pinkerton detective (William Berger) rides along the divide anticipating The Wild Bunch. The fascist inside the idealist, the lynching posse led by the jailed comrade, the exodus paused just long enough for a close-up of an indigenous mother to fill the screen like a lost Catlin portrait. "You know, culture betrays you." From here it is just a stone's throw to Le Vent d'Est with Volonté back in Western gear. With Jolanda Modio, Carole André, Gianni Rizzo, Lidia Alfonsi, Ángel del Pozo, Aldo Sambrell, Nello Pazzafini, José Torres, Linda Veras, Antonio Casas, and Frank Braña.