“A rapturously beautiful film well remembered
for its golden fields and sublime magic-hour light...
It lives up to its title.”
– The New York Times

“DON’T MISS! As a vision of pastoral loveliness,
this golden-hued 1978 drama remans unequaled.”
– Time Out New York

“Almost incontestably the
most gorgeously photographed film ever made.”
– Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice

“[A] free-spirited Hollywood masterwork.”
– The New Yorker

“The images, dialogue and hushed music
(by Ennio Morricone) fuse into a story
that has the resonance of a biblical fable
and the intensity of a dream.”
– Stephen Holden, The New York Times

“Aching gorgeousness…
A rare tragedy of the heart.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

(1978) “Nobody’s perfect. There was never a perfect person around. You just have half-angel, half-devil in you.” Linda Manz’s twelve-year-old narrator (then a fifteen-year-old, four-foot-ten chain-smoking New York street kid) with the bizarre brogue has seen it all: love, death, and a plague of locusts. 1916, and Chicagoans Richard Gere, little sister Manz, and lover Brooke Adams (pretending to be his other sister), head for the Texas Panhandle (Alberta, Canada standing in) to work the wheat fields of prosperous farmer Sam Shepard. An ensuing marriage is only the beginning of a bizarre love triangle, ending with violent death amid that spectacular locust plague, and a Badlands-style manhunt for a killer, even as the unfazable Linda wonders if she’ll get a “fuh” from a fella someday.

Legendary auteur/dreamer Terrence Malick’s second film before a twenty year break (coming between 1973’s Badlands and 1998’s The Thin Red Line), Days of Heaven was acclaimed for its dazzling visuals (“Hauntingly beautiful” – Jack Kroll, Newsweek; “Breathtakingly beautiful” – William Wolf, Cue; “One of the most beautiful films ever made” – Richard Corliss), winning Malick Best Director at Cannes, plus his first New York Film Critics Circle award, even then winnowing his final work from a gigantic mass of footage (“They could probably make another movie from what was left over.” – Brooke Adams). Shot almost entirely during the “magic hour” before sundown, with natural light, the arresting images just keep coming: Manz’s wide-eyed gaze, a train passing over a lacework bridge, the frosty fields of the prairie, the pearly sweat of the harvesters, a crystal glass at the bottom of a river. Inspired by Vermeer (and perhaps by Wyeth and Hopper), cinematographer Nestor Almendros cleared the photography awards at both Cannes and the Oscars.
A PARAMOUNT PICTURES RELEASE

“One of the great cinematic achievements of the 1970s.” – Variety

Return to MORRICONE Series

Roger Ebert of DAYS OF HEAVEN