Background
Days
of Heaven
(1978) is an exquisite, lyrical film of exceptional
visual beauty and only the second film of writer-director Terrence
Malick, following his critically-acclaimed success with an equally-haunting
and visually-striking
Badlands (1973)
.
[Malick wouldn't direct another film for 20 years, until
The
Thin Red Line (1998)
.] This moody, elegiac film has universally
been acclaimed as a cinematographic masterpiece, from the talents
of Cuban-born European Nestor Almendros (and 'additional photography'
by Haskell Wexler), with naturally-lit, sweeping, 70mm images of
crystal clarity and scope, and artfully composed scenes reminiscent
of Andrew Wyeth paintings. The film's tagline proclaimed:
"Your
eyes... Your ears... Your senses... will be overwhelmed."
However, the surreal, epic-type film counterposes its
superlative photography with a slim tale of working class protagonists,
told with sparse dialogue and the jarring, quirky, drawling, and
dispassionate, colloquial voice-over narration of a streetwise, but
unschooled 13 year old girl (Manz). The film is also a social chronicling
of the rough-hewn, simple lives of migrant American harvest workers
in the Gilded Age during a time of growing industrialization, told
with a mix of classical music, contemporary music, and natural sounds.
The film's plot is similar to the story in the Biblical
Book of Ruth, and the film's title was derived from Deuteronomy 11:21
("That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children,
in the land which the Lord swore unto your fathers to give them,
as the
days of heaven
upon the earth.")
Disharmony and tragedy in the poetic film's conclusion
arise because of the conflict between the male protagonists in a
fatal, fiery love triangle, who both demand the exclusive love of
a female.
A second tagline described the love
triangle in the plot:
"She gave her hand to one man, but her heart
to another."
A wealthy, lonely, land-owning, raw-boned farmer (Shepard
in his acting debut) of the Great Plains falls in love with the girlfriend
(Adams) of a hot-headed wheat-field worker (Gere), who is masquerading
as the field hand's sister. The 'heavenly,' golden-hued, contented,
and idyllic days of the drifters, who have found salvation on the
wheat farm, are shattered with the discovered revelation of the real
nature of the relationship between the brother and sister, and an
accompanying plague of locusts and fire (typical of Old Testament
judgments). Scheming deception, greedy avarice, jealous envy, adultery,
and eventually murder result from the conflict.
The simple love story set on a pastoral landscape becomes
a profound allegorical tale of harmony and discontinuity, love and
hate, hopes and fears, and good and evil. Its emotional impact is
shaped by the unique perspective of the narrator - a typical teenager
telling the tale out of her own youthful concerns (having fun, her
uncertain future), combining her beliefs about the dual contradictory
nature of humanity ("you just got half-devil and half-angel
in ya"), and imaginative and fearsome fantasies of religious
judgment and divine retribution (the flaming end of the world, and
the Devil's presence on Earth).
The film trailer's narrator succinctly described the
plot of Malick's film:
In 1916, America was changing, expanding, holding
a promise of new prosperity. People heard the call and it made
them restless. Empires were being built in the wide-open spaces,
and so they came. Each one oddly, blindly searching for the days
of heaven. Days of Heaven, the story of a man who had nothing,
the woman who loved him, and the man who would give her everything
for a share of that love. Three people whose destinies joined briefly
in a dream - but how long could it last?
Although allegedly located in the wheat-growing area
of World War I Texas in the early part of the 20th century, the film
was shot on location in Alberta, Canada over a two-year period. It
was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Costume Design
(Patricia Norris), Best Original Score (Ennio Morricone), Best Sound,
and won one well-deserved Oscar for Best Cinematography.
Plot Synopsis
The opening credits sequence, accompanied by a rendering
of Camille Saint-Saens "Carnival of the Animals," provides
sepia-toned historical period photographs (from the Library of Congress,
various museums and photographic archives, and the NY Public Library)
of turn-of-the-century city and tenement life (portraits, closeups,
slices of life including play, marriage, work, politics, friendships,
transportation, domesticity, and leisure time). The titles sequence
ends with a photo of the teenaged girl that has been sepia-toned
to appear like a real-life period photo.
The exterior of a Chicago steel mill, and a view of
junk pickers (one of whom is Abby) searching through industrial scrap.
Inside, workers shovel coal into the red-hot, glowing furnaces, surrounded
by the deafening noise. Molten iron pours out into molds. Quarrelsome
Bill (Richard Gere) has an undisclosed, violent altercation with
his foreman, punches him to the ground, and renders him unconscious
- thereby forcing him to run from the scene and leave town as a fugitive.
[Bill experiences further difficulty with another work foreman later
in the film.]
The voice-over narration of Bill's young sister Linda
(Linda Manz) begins:
Me and my brother, it just used to be me and my brother,
we used to do things together. We used to have fun. We used to
roam the streets. There was people suffering of pain and hunger.
Some people their tongues were hangin' out of their mouth.
Bill - an ex-apple juggler, girlfriend Abby (Brooke
Adams) posing as Bill's sister to avoid answering inevitable questions
about their unmarried state, and teenaged waif Linda, board a west-bound
freight train to escape the city's heat and authorities. Bill assures
Abby that things will
"get fixed up":
Just got to get fixed up first. Things aren't always
gonna be this way. You know that, don't you?
The drifters switch trains at a station and scamper
toward another boxcar. To the tune of Leo Kottke's acoustical guitar "Enderlin,"
their steam locomotive crosses a high suspension/trestle bridge, silhouetted
against the partly cloudy blue sky. The original threesome of the film
(Bill/Abby/Linda) sit atop the overloaded train, sharing their ride
through Midwest farmlands and America's heartland with dozens of other
would-be harvest hands.
(Linda's voice-over) In fact, all three of us been
goin' places, lookin' for things, searchin' for things, goin' on
adventures. They told everybody they were brother and sister. My
brother didn't want nobody to know. You know how people are. You
tell 'em somethin' - they start talkin'.
She prophetically fears a fiery apocalypse that will
consume everything in its path, unless one is judged to be good and
saved by God's mercy in heaven:
(Linda's voice-over) I met this guy named Ding-Dong.
He told me the whole Earth is goin' up in flame. Flames will come
out of here and there and they'll just rise up. The mountains are
gonna go up in big flames, the water's gonna rise in flames. There's
gonna be creatures runnin' every which way, some of them burnt,
half of their wings burnin'. People are gonna be screamin' and
hollerin' for help. See, the people that have been good - they're
gonna go to heaven and escape all that fire. But if you've been
bad, God don't even hear you. He don't even hear ya talkin'.
The train slows and many of the itinerant workers jump
off with bundles and small suitcases in their hands. A farm foreman
(Robert Wilke) with wagons awaiting harvest workers, bellows to everyone
through a megaphone:
"Sackers, I need sackers." Supposedly, a man can make $3
dollars in a day "if he wants to work." Bill accepts the
offer and they join others on trucks and horse-pulled wagons across
the golden plains at sunset, bound for a wheat farm on the flat landscape
of the Panhandle.
The wagons pass under an entrance archway. The farm
house, amidst immense fields of golden wheat, stands three stories
tall in the distance as a lone fixture. It is a Victorian house,
with one pointed tower and a noisy wind generator atop. A flagpole
displays the Texas Lone Star State flag. An expensive open convertible
is parked in front. The unnamed owner (Sam Shepard) bites into an
apple as he observes the newcomers arriving. [One could read this
story as a symbolic tale of Eden like the early chapters of the Biblical
book of Genesis, with its prototypical Adam and Eve characters, the
natural bounty of God's generous gifts, the biting of the apple,
temptation, sin, and subsequent banishment from 'heaven' by the coming
of a fiery 'hell.'] A rectangular-shaped red dormitory or bunkhouse,
a hundred yards away, serves as the drop-off point. The workers are
warned about avoiding the owner's house:
Don't any of you go up around there either.
Bill drinks in the beauty of the wheat fields with
a trace of mountains on the horizon, with bison roaming the wild
land. Hawks and eagles fly free. The wind rustles through the crop.
As they walk through the waist-high wheat, Linda befriends one of
the other young girls (Jackie Shultis) of her age, who is saving
up one of her
makins
- a hand-made, rolled-up cigarette. A
closeup of crickets on the stalks. Italian is heard being spoken
among the migrants. As the sun sets, Bill, Abby, and Linda engage
in a playful game of tag.
The sun rises at dawn - reddish-brown clouds provide
a backdrop for a silhouetted scarecrow, whose right arm blows back
and forth in the wind. Signalmen wave flags to pass a message from
hill to hill. The owner snaps off the head of a stalk, rolls it between
his palms, blows away the chaff, and then pops a kernel into his
mouth. He nods - satisfied that the harvest work can commence. Flanked
by two young acolytes, a Russian Orthodox Preacher (John Wilkinson)
reads a passage from the Bible (Psalm 90:4) to offer a blessing and
thanksgiving:
For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday
when it is past, and as a watch in the night. As soon as thou scatters
them..
The workers and their families are solemnly gathered
around in the field, listening to the prayer. When "Amen" is
pronounced, everyone walks to the crest of the hill. A steam whistle
blows, the owner signals with a sweep of his arm, and horse-drawn
mowing machines (or binders) begin to cut the stalks. It is back-breaking
work as the laborers toss the bunches of cut wheat aside, where it
is raked or bunched together into sheaves/bushels. Closeups show
wild fowl, rabbits and skunks scurrying to find sanctuary somewhere
in the ever-decreasing wheat field. The foreman, riding in a buggy,
chides everyone to work hard, while the owner sits in a padded chair
in the middle of a field. During the mid-day meal break at the cookhouse,
Abby's captivating beauty catches the owner's eye as she walks by:
(Linda's voice-over) This farmer - he didn't know
when he first saw her or what it was about her that caught his
eye. Maybe it was the way the wind blew through her hair.
After being served in food lines, some of the workers
find shade under umbrellas planted around. One of the loutish workers
impertinently asks Bill: "Your sister keeps you warm at night,
does she?" Angered, Bill throws two plates of stew and mashed
potatoes onto the man. After the man responds in kind, they wrestle
each other to the ground.
Linda plucks the feathers off a chicken, while other
women and children rest in the shade of a wagon. Work continues into
the afternoon. Bill wears a white, full-length smock or duster coat
unlike the other workers. The owner is still intrigued about the
unusually-beautiful worker, and asks his foreman about "the
woman with the black hair" among the others. At dusk, the foreman
walks along a row of shocks and complains to Abby about her inferior
work: "You wasted more than 12 bushels in this row. I'm docking
you $3 dollars." Bill protests the indignity but, fearful of
being fired, he resists the urge to fight. Abby calms his demoralized
feelings:
"Don't worry about it." Bill inspects Abby's swollen and
cracked hands from the day's hard labor, and promises to seek a doctor's
care.
After work, the men swim in a nearby pond to clean
up. A black retriever plunges in alongside. Bill searches frantically
for some salve or medicine to soothe Abby's hands in a doctor's medicine
wagon parked outside the owner's house - in an area forbidden to
him. He locates a tin of salve just as the owner steps out of the
house. He overhears a crucial conversation with the doctor about
the farmer's terminal illness:
Farmer: You never think it's gonna happen to you.
Doctor: Yep.
Farmer: How long would you reckon I have? You know, you can tell
me.
Doctor: A year, maybe a year.
(Linda's voice-over): He knew he was gonna die. He
knew there was nothing there could be done. You're only on this
Earth once. And, to my opinion, as long as you're around, we should
have it nice.
Wandering around after chasing peacocks with Linda,
Abby suddenly finds herself close to the owner's house - and the
owner suddenly pokes up in the field in front of her and asks: "Where
are you from?" and
"Where do you go from here?" She shrugs: "All over.
Wyoming. Do you think I like it?"
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