AWARDS
WINNER: 1979 Academy Awards USA: Oscar Best Cinematography
NOMINATIONS: 1979 Academy Awards USA: Oscar Best Music, Best Costume, Best Sound
WINNER: 1979 Cannes Film Festival: Best Director: Terrence Malick
NOMINATIONS: Golden Globes USA: Best Motion Picture, Best Director
SYNOPSIS:
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. 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?
An exquisite, lyrical film of exceptional visual beauty from writer-director Terrence Malick, following his critically-acclaimed success with an equally-haunting and visually-striking Badlands (1973), DAYS OF HEAVEN was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning the Oscar for Best Cinematography, and has universally been acclaimed as a cinematographic masterpiece, 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."
REVIEW:
DAYS OF HEAVEN is above all one of the most beautiful films ever made. It takes place during the years before World War I. Outside Chicago, Bill (Richard Gere) gets in a fight with a steel mill foreman and kills him. With his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) and his kid sister Linda (Linda Manz), he hops a train to Texas, where the harvest is in progress, and all three get jobs as laborers on the vast wheat field of a farmer (Sam Shepard). Bill tells everyone Abby is his sister, and gets in a fight with a field hand who suggests otherwise.
The farmer falls in love with Abby and asks her to stay after the harvest is over. Bill overhears a conversation between the farmer and a doctor, and learns that the farmer has perhaps a year to live. In a strategy familiar from THE WINGS OF THE DOVE, he suggests that Abby marry the farmer--and then, when he dies, he and Abby will at last have money enough to live happily. "He was tired of livin' like the rest of 'em, nosing around like a pig in a gutter," Linda confides on the soundtrack. But later she observes of the farmer: "Instead of getting sicker, he just stayed the same; the doctor must of give him some pills or something."
The farmer sees Bill and Abby in tender moments together, feels that is not the way a brother and sister should behave and challenges Bill. Bill leaves, hitching a ride with an aerial circus that has descended out of the sky. Abby, the farmer and Linda live happily for a year, and then Bill returns at harvest time. All of the buried issues boil up to the surface again, against a backdrop of biblical misfortune: a plague of grasshoppers, fields in flame, murder, loss, exile. rogerebert
