In
1978, just after I bought my first VHS-VCR, a humongous Magnavox that cost $800
(I had to finance it, and 12 blank tapes that ran another $300), I was watching
Sneak Previews, the first PBS show with Siskel and Ebert, when they played a
clip from Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven.
As
Frank Rich wrote in his Time review:
Days of Heaven is lush with
brilliant images. Set in the Texas Panhandle just before World War I, this
movie unleashes one spectacular panorama after another: snowy plains aglow in
the blue light of a winter moon, wheatfields shimmering under a burnt autumn
sun, expansive skies carpeted with cumulus clouds. There is enough beauty here
for a dozen movies; yet the total effect is far from pretty. Slowly but surely
the sharp images carve away at the audience's guts.
It was
the scene near the end, when Bill (Richard Gere) and his girlfriend Abby (Brooke
Adams) are on the run from police because he has killed the husband (The Farmer
-Sam Shepard) he convinced her to marry because he thought he (The Farmer) was
going to die soon and they would inherit his farm and holdings.
But Abby fell in love with The Farmer
which led to the fatal confrontation between Bill and The Farmer after Bill
returns to the farm after an absence and brings a plague of locusts with him that
begin to eat all the wheat, until The Farmer orders the whole field and crop be
burned to the ground.
“Holy
Crap!” I said (I was living alone at the time and had a tendency to exclaim to
myself). I had heard him play at Blackburn College in 1977 and at that time he
mentioned he had written some movie music. His 1978 album, “Burnt Lips” had two
songs from Days of Heaven, “The Credits: Outtakes from Terry’s Movie”
and this song, “The Train and the Gate: From Terry’s Movie”.
I had
to wait awhile, but Days of Heaven finally came out on home video in 1979. I
rented it from Fotomat; they had little drive-up kiosks in shopping center
parking lots. You drove through to rent movies.
Oh my
gosh, it was glorious, even on a 25” color TV.
The cinematography was exquisite
and the sound track sublime. Written by Ennio Morricone (who had cut his teeth
on the “spaghetti” westerns of the 1960’s, along with many other films), the
soundtrack is by far my favorite..ever. I went through a John Williams phase
(Star Wars, Close Encounters), but Days of Heaven is the only soundtrack I still
regularly listen to.
As soon as I could find it (I may
have ordered it from Apple Tree Records in Elgin), I bought the album of the
soundtrack. It was on the Pacific Arts label, owned by Michael Nesmith of the
Monkees (Bert Schneider, one of the creators of the Monkees, was producer of Days
of Heaven). For over 30 years there was no CD version available, so I
listened on a cassette tape I had transferred the album to.
Days of Heaven was the album
I listened to most in 1978, when I was writing my Master’s Thesis at Western Illinois
University. I wrote every night from 10PM to 2 AM or so, listening to it and
Bach and Leo Kottke’s “Dreams and All That Stuff”, an instrumental album.
When I started to digitize my
albums in 2011, the first album I did was “Days of Heaven.” In 2012 I was
searching Amazon.com and found that a 2-CD set had come out in 2011 of the
soundtrack. I bought it and have the Main Theme on the Zune playlist and listen
to the CD at work at lunchtime.
In 1979, Days of Heaven was
re-released to theaters (along with An Officer and a Gentleman), as a Richard
Gere two-fer, and I finally got to see the 70mm/Dolby sound version and I was
blown away. It was shown at the Woodfield Theater (long gone), a large
auditorium with high-backed, rocking seats.
As Roger Ebert wrote:
Terrence Malick's
"Days of Heaven" has been praised for its painterly images and
evocative score, but criticized for its muted emotions: Although passions erupt
in a deadly love triangle, all the feelings are somehow held at arm's length.
This observation is true enough, if you think only about the actions of the
adults in the story. But watching this 1978 film again recently, I was struck
more than ever with the conviction that this is the story of a teenage girl,
told by her, and its subject is the way that hope and cheer have been beaten
down in her heart. We do not feel the full passion of the adults because it is
not her passion: It is seen at a distance, as a phenomenon, like the weather,
or the plague of grasshoppers that signals the beginning of the end
It has since become my go-to movie
to gauge whether someone has the same taste in movies as I do. Most people have
never heard of it, but it’s worth a view, especially if it’s on a fairly large
screen. It was one of the first DVDs I bought to test out our projector TV with
digital sound. I later bought the
Criterion Collection Edition on Blu-ray.
The final scene, as Linda runs away
from a boarding school to meet up with a friend she met when she worked the wheat
harvest, she says simply (in the narration),”This girl..she didn’t know where
she was goin’ or what she was gonna do…she didn’t have no money…maybe she’d
meet up with a character…I was hoping things would work out for her…she was a
good friend of mine” the music wells
up (the Main Theme, link) and so do I, every time.
