Question about the end... *SPOILERS*

You know, I actually have to answer this, because I've seen you mention the ending to the re-edited version, and I actually think it's detestable. Out of the damages inflicted to the film in re-editing it, I think the ending is the single worst one.

Intercutting the ending with flashbacks is storytelling of the most simplified, obvious and heavy-handed kind. As it originally plays, the movie tells us everything we need to know with silence, with pure visual information. The emptiness of the room, the sterility of all the material possessions, the other woman, Kristofferson taking it all in and finally breaking down. That tells us all we need to know. The flashbacks are so heavy-handed, so blunt, so shamelessly obvious about the scene intents, it says leagues about what United Artist thought of audiences at the time (and what all the studios think now): that audiences are so simple, so stupid, that you have to narratively carry their hand all the way. Such an approach leaves no room for ambiguity, no room for subtext, no room for pure visual storytelling: in short, no room for cinema.

Michael Cimino: "There's a scene in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid where Slim Pickens gets shot. He's sitting on a rock at the edge of a lake and his wife is sitting on another rock across from him. He's dying. There are no words, but it's a magnificent scene. The unspoken understanding between them is beyond description."

It's on this principle that Cimino films most of Heaven's Gate. He helps return cinema to a visual medium as much as possible. Critics and audiences inability (or refusal) to engage with the film on this level is their fault, and their loss.

And cutting out the "other woman" is irrevocably damaging to the intent of the prologue, and completely neuters the message, white-washing the extent of Avery's final compromise: defeatism in conformity. He witnesses the massacre at Johnson County, and in defeat, joins the very monstrous society that engineered it. The "other woman" makes it final: Ella Watson was the only thing he unquestionably cared about, the biggest personal loss he suffered, and he's even willing to sell that memory out. Nothing is sacred, nothing beyond corruption. Society can commit terrible crimes, shameless atrocities, and paper up the cracks with prosperity, "the American Dream".

The whole shorter version is a lark. UA felt the audiences needed their hands carried all the way. It destroys the narrative structure of the original, and replaces with a dull, A-Z conventional narrative. Redubbing the opening scene with a line like "Still going to Wyoming, James" doesn't clarify anything: it ruins the scene. Now the audience knows what's coming next, and instead of focusing on what purpose the Harvard Segment serves, they only wait for what's next. And when that the next scene comes, it also spells where it's going next, and the audience also loses focus on the present. But if there's no focus on the present, there's no reason for a film at all. It's why most conventional narratives nowadays are awful. The entire story must be predetermined from scene one, every scene serving the sole purpose of moving along the narrative, every connection clearly spelled out, every important piece of information overemphasized, everything ambiguous or subjective rejected as superfluous, every thematic message amplified and yelled out as many times as possible, all meaning simplified to the crudest ideas possible. Classical narratives only work in times of Classicism, otherwise they're largely formulaic and self-sabotaging. If you can know everything you need to know about a film from its opening scene (or its trailer) then why bother with the rest of the film? Cimino had vision enough to disrupt the conventional narrative. That's a reason for praise, not crucifixion.

And you might miss that the woman in the end was the woman at the beginning, if you're asleep at the wheel (her portrait even shows up several times in Avery's room). But mistaking her for Isabelle Huppert just shows you're not even engaging with the movie. There is no resemblance, not to mention very little narrative sense for such a turn-of-events.