To no movie have I been more favorably predisposed than to Days of Heaven. I rate Terrence Malick’s previous film (his first), Badlands, above all other American pictures of the last few years, and so I awaited the philosophy-instructor-turned-filmmaker’s new work —which met with various delays and had a hard, slow coming—with uncommon eagerness. The first few minutes of Days of Heaven, sure enough, promised to fulfill all expectations. The titles, against a background of period stills (1916 or thereabouts), provided a highly evocative sequence, even if the device is becoming overused; by the time we leave the Chicago steel mill where the hero, Bill, has killed a tyrannical foreman in a fight, we have witnessed images of explosive beauty and a dramatic event staged with stark economy.
When Bill, his teenaged sister, Linda, and his girl, Abby, set off by train for the Texas Panhandle, we get a shot of such overwhelming magnificence as one rarely encounters on screen. It is a long shot in silhouette of a train crossing a bridge, but the way the entire span of the train precisely fills out the wide-screen frame, the manner in which these archaic-looking railroad cars and engine blackly detach themselves from the cerulean background, the curious interplay of spidery train and bridge shapes, and something else that I cannot explain—perhaps the presence of some deus ignotus—add up to a breathtaking vision of technology in the ascendant.
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