Few films look like Days of Heaven. Terrence Malick’s second feature is a story told in golden light, in wind moving through wheat, in long silences broken by a child’s plainspoken narration. At its centre is Richard Gere as Bill, a young labourer whose pride, love, and bad judgement set a quiet tragedy in motion. It was only Gere’s fourth film, yet it remains one of the performances by which his early career is judged — and one of the most beautiful American films of the 1970s.
The Story
Days of Heaven is set in 1916. Bill works in a Chicago steel mill, where the heat, noise, and exhaustion of the job are established in the film’s opening minutes. After a confrontation in which Bill kills his foreman, he flees the city with Abby, played by Brooke Adams, the woman he loves, and with his younger sister, Linda, played by Linda Manz. To avoid scandal and suspicion, Bill and Abby pretend to be brother and sister.
The three travel south and find seasonal work on a vast wheat farm on the Texas Panhandle, harvesting the crop alongside other migrant workers. The farm’s owner, played by Sam Shepard, is a wealthy but lonely young man, known only as the Farmer. He falls in love with Abby. Bill, hearing that the Farmer is ill and may not live long, encourages Abby to marry him, believing that they will inherit his fortune when he dies. It is a scheme born of poverty and opportunism, but also of a desperate wish for security.
What follows is not a simple con. Abby grows genuinely fond of the Farmer, who treats her with tenderness. Bill grows jealous, even as he watches the life he hoped to gain slip into something more complicated and more human. The Farmer, sensing the truth, becomes suspicious and tormented. Then nature intervenes: a plague of locusts descends on the wheat, and a fire sweeps through the fields, destroying the harvest that was to be everyone’s future. In the aftermath, the Farmer confronts Bill, Bill kills him, and Bill flees once more — this time toward a death that feels, in Malick’s telling, less like punishment than like the closing of a circle. Abby leaves for a new life, and Linda, left behind, is last seen at a boarding school, still narrating in her flat, observant voice.
Bill: A Hero Who Cannot Stay Still
Gere’s Bill is not a villain, and he is not quite a hero either. He is a young man who wants a better life but does not know how to wait for it. In Chicago, he is quick-tempered and proud; on the farm, he is watchful, tender with Linda, and quietly possessive of Abby. Gere plays him with a physical restlessness — he moves, he works, he looks away — that makes his moments of stillness, when he watches Abby with the Farmer, all the more painful.
That ambiguity is essential to the film. Malick does not explain Bill’s motives in speeches. Instead, the audience must read them in Gere’s face: the calculation when he suggests the marriage, the guilt when he sees Abby’s affection for the Farmer grow, the panic when the plan collapses. It is a performance built on restraint, and it showed, even at this early stage, the quality that would define Gere’s best work — the ability to suggest thought and feeling without announcing them.
Linda Manz’s narration, written in a child’s unadorned language, frames Bill’s story as something remembered rather than judged. She does not condemn her brother, and neither does the film. Days of Heaven is interested less in blame than in how ordinary human weakness, mixed with love and ambition, can turn a season of plenty into ruin.
A Film Made in Magic Hour
Days of Heaven is famous for how it was made. Malick and cinematographer Néstor Almendros shot much of the film during the “magic hour” — the brief period just after sunset, when the light is soft, golden, and fleeting. The production, filmed largely in Alberta, Canada, standing in for the Texas Panhandle, worked with natural light wherever possible, and Malick encouraged improvisation on set. Much of the dialogue was reshaped in the editing room, where Malick spent nearly two years cutting the film and adding Linda’s narration to carry the story.
The result is a film that feels less plotted than observed. Scenes drift, images linger, and Ennio Morricone’s score — drawing on Camille Saint-Saëns’s “The Carnival of the Animals” — gives the wheat fields and the farmhouse a dreamlike, almost biblical quality. The locust sequence, in which the sky darkens with insects, remains one of the most startling passages in American cinema: nature, which had seemed so generous, turns suddenly hostile, as if answering the characters’ deceptions.
For that cinematography, Almendros won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Malick won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was not a commercial success on its first release, but its reputation has only grown. It is now routinely cited as one of the great visual achievements of 1970s American cinema, and as a key film in the movement sometimes called the New Hollywood.
Why It Matters in Gere’s Career
Before Days of Heaven, Gere had appeared in Report to the Commissioner (1975), Baby Blue Marine (1976), and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). None of those roles had given him a part of this scale or this stillness. Malick’s film asked him to carry a story that was told largely through images, and he rose to it. He did not try to dominate the landscape; he let the landscape dominate him, and in doing so he made Bill feel like a real person rather than a symbol.
The film also set a pattern. Gere’s most interesting roles in the years that followed — in Yanks (1979), American Gigolo (1980), and An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) — all drew on the same tension between surface charm and inner uncertainty that he first explored as Bill. Days of Heaven proved that he could be a leading man without being a conventional one: he could be the centre of a film and still leave room for mystery.
The Film Today
Seen today, Days of Heaven feels strikingly modern. Its concern with migrant labour, with wealth and poverty, and with the way people use each other in the hope of escaping hardship, has not dated. Its visual beauty has not dated either, though it is now understood as something more than beauty: the golden light is part of the story, a kind of paradise that the characters believe they can enter and keep, and that proves impossible to hold.
For Richard Gere, it remains a signature role because it captures him at the moment of becoming. He was twenty-eight when the film was released, still new to cinema, and yet he already understood something essential about screen acting: that the camera will do half the work if the actor trusts it. In Days of Heaven, he trusted it completely, and the film, in return, gave him a place in cinema history that no later success could erase.