You can keep your 1941s, your Ishtars, your Cutthroat Islands. In the kingdom of legendary Hollywood bombs, one reigns supreme. Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is the movie that sunk a film company, incinerated its director’s career, and pretty much called a halt to a whole era of cinema.

In the broad sweep of Hollywood history, if Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is the movie that opened a door – inaugurating the period of unparalleled creative freedom that fostered the likes of Scorsese, Coppola, Friedkin and Bogdanovich in the Seventies – Heaven’s Gate is the flop that slammed that very same door shut. The echo is still felt.

Cimino, who has died at the age of 77, never truly recovered from the Heaven's Gate fiasco. His monumental frontier Western became a byword for profligacy, budgetary blow-out and box-office calamity. Quite literally: when Kevin Costner was running dangerously over-schedule on Dances with Wolves (1990), then Waterworld (1995), and then The Postman (1997) – the true turkey of those three – the industry gag was that “Kevin’s Gate” was in the offing.