What a splendid way to introduce our new projector to MovieNight! Terence Mallick’s Days of Heaven was alive with cinematography so grand in scale that it seemed as though our screen might just burst. As Norris remarked some days later, “In magazines, newspapers, and film blogs. we’re used to seeing the same two or three magnificent stills from key landmarks in cinematography. In Days of Heaven, it feels like you see one every two minutes or so.”

Still, Mallick struggled to weave all this stunning footage into a cohesive story until he fell back on the idea of using a narrator (as he had done with Sissy Spacek in his previous masterpiece of Americana, Badlands). 17 year old Linda Mantz (pictured above) just improvised the whole narration. “They took me into a voice recording studio.”, remembers Manz, in a 2011 Village Voice interview. “No script, nothing, I just watched the movie and rambled on . . . I dunno, they took whatever dialogue they liked.”  Brilliant.

Richard Gere and Sam Sheppard looked so fresh and young, then aged 28 and 35, respectively. Is that why there were so many ladies at MovieNight? Hey… I’m not complaining!

More about this film on IMDb