Days of Heaven (1978)

Directed by Terrence Malick. With Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz. A hot-tempered farm laborer convinces the woman he loves to marry their rich but dying boss so that they can have a claim to his fortune.

One of the most critically-acclaimed films of all time, Days of Heaven is a moving story about two men who love the same woman. Richard Gere, a fugitive from...

Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, the long-awaited follow-up to his 1973 debut Badlands, confirmed his reputation as a visual poet and narrative iconoclast with a story of love and murder told through the jaded voice of a child and expressive images of nature. In 1916, Chicago steelworker Bill (Richard Gere, stepping in for John Travolta) flees to Texas with his little sister Linda (Linda Manz) and girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) after fatally erupting at his boss. Along with other itinerant laborers, they work the harvest at a wealthy, ailing farmer's ranch, but the farmer (playwright Sam Shepard) falls in love with Abby, and, believing her to be Bill's sister, asks the three to stay on at his elysian spread. Seeing it as his one real chance to escape perpetual poverty, Bill urges Abby to marry the sick man. Marriage, however, has more restorative powers, and the farmer has more magnetism, than Bill had planned.

Terrence Malick's first film wowed audiences; his second, Days of Heaven, set a rapturous new standard in cinema aesthetics. David Thomson shines a light on its legacy

Overview of Days of Heaven, 1978, directed by Terrence Malick, with Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, at Turner Classic Movies

In 1910, a Chicago steel worker accidentally kills his supervisor and flees to the Texas panhandle with his girlfriend and little sister to work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer. A love triangle, a swarm of locusts, a hellish fire—Malick captures it all with dreamlike authenticity, creating at once a timeless American idyll and a gritty evocation of turn-of-the-century labor.