Having co-written the screenplays for two middling but interesting 70s genre films, Silent Running and Magnum Force (the latter with John Milius), Cimino's script for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was purchased by Clint Eastwood, who intended to direct and star in it himself. Cimino persuaded Eastwood to allow him to direct it and the film, a peculiar little heist story, was a hit — Jeff Bridges was even Oscar nominated for his role — and Cimino was suddenly a player. For his next film, the extraordinarily ambitious tale of the effect of the Vietnam War on a group of Pennsylvania Steelworkers, Cimino gathered a starry cast, a sizeable budget and the trust of a major studio.

Has any director ever trumped "difficult second album syndrome" quite so effectively? The Deer Hunter is a Great Film, one of the best of the decade, perhaps one of the greatest American films ever made. It was an immediate Critical and commercial success, it won 5 Oscars — including Best Film and Best Director — and it gave Cimino a clout most of his peers could only dream of. Ever ambitious, he decided to use that clout to make a massive Western which was really a Marxist history of the Johnson County Wars, and indeed of the American expansion into the West itself. Heaven's Gate would cost $40 million, the equivalent of $107 million today, come in months behind schedule, and prove a resounding flop, both with audiences and critics. Cimino's original cut was over 5 hours long, but United Artists forced him to cut that down to 219 minutes for its premiere at the New York Film Festival, where it was eviscerated by critics. The film was again subjected to editing and the version eventually released was only 149 minutes long and barely coherent. It earned $1.8 million at the American Box Office. The financial fallout of this failure led to the demise of United Artists itself.

Cimino moved on, though his reputation had suffered such damage that no Hollywood Studio would involve itself with him, and five years after the 1980 release of Heaven's Gate he was forced to finance his next film, The Year of the Dragon, independently. It was a commercial success but didn't fare quite so well with critics, and his next effort, The Sicilian, was an outright failure. In the 20 years since he has made only two films (Desperate Hours and Sunchaser), both of them unmemorable and lacking any evidence of the involvement of the singular talent responsible for The Deer Hunter. He lives in Paris, has published a novel, and is still the subject of numerous Hollywood rumours, including tales of madness and sex changes. From Oscar Winning Wonderkid to exiled has-been in a few decades is an impressive decline by any standards. But at least Cimino has left a legacy to be proud of.

Momentarily leaving aside The Deer Hunter, the two films that bookend it both have their admirable qualities. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is perhaps the quirkiest film Clint Eastwood made in the 1970s, a buddy movie comedy-drama, made with uncommon confidence and sureness of tone by a debuting director. If Cimino used it as a sort of film school — and he has spoken at length of his admiration for and gratitude to Eastwood — then he learned his lessons well, because the leap between it and his two subsequent films is enormous. Heaven's Gate has been re-evaluated in the decades since its original release. A screening of its 219 minute cut on the American cable channel the Z-Channel in the mid-80s was met with some approving reviews, echoing the noises coming from France, where the film had a strong following among Film critics.