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Days of Heaven (1978)
Director: Terrence Malick
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Wide-eyed, streetwise Abby (Adams) and her lover come (amidst thousands of other croppers from the industrial north) to the startlingly fertile harvest landscape of World War I Texas. Once there, they are caught up in a diffident, ultimately fatal triangle with their ailing young landowner-boss (Shepard): these are the surreal, idyllic, numbered Days of Heaven. This strange fusion of love story, social portrait and allegorical epic, by the director of Badlands, is rooted like that film in recent history, and held together only by its voice-over commentary and staggering visual sense. Where it goes further is in a profound chilling of romantic style, which treats lovers and insects alike as they flit through the vast wheat fields at dusk. Eventually (with a plague-of-locusts climax and the lovers' flight) the narrative collapses, leaving its audience breathlessly suspended between a 90-minute proof that all the bustling activity in the world means nothing, and the perfection of Malick's own perverse desire to catalogue it nonetheless. Compulsive.Author: CA
Cast & crew
Director: Terrence Malick
Producer: Bert Schneider, Harold Schneider
Cast: Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz, Robert Wilke, Jackie Shultis, Stuart Margolin full cast
Duration: 94 mins
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