Word: gering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first film, his new work is a bleak and unstinting attack on America's materialistic culture. But Malick is an artist, not a polemicist; his scabrous ideas are expressed in the elegiac terms of a fable. In Days of Heaven he tells of a migrant worker, Bill (Richard Gere), who travels from Chicago with his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) and his kid sister Linda (Linda Manz) to harvest wheat for an aristocratic Texas farmer (Playwright Sam Shepard). Tired of "nosing around like a pig" and infuriated by his employer's wealth, Bill decides to use the ravishing Abby...
...Richard Kiley) and first lover (Alan Feinstein) are far less sympathetically drawn than they were in the novel. Theresa's one appealing suitor (William Atherton), whose sweetness should leaven the story, becomes as cruel as the rest. Only the Italian stud Tony, played with magnetic ferocity by Richard Gere, seems remotely human...
Regrettably, the director largely abandons the altruistic thread in the narrative as he increasingly dwells on Dunn's plunge into the hedonist ethic. The repeated humiliation accorded Theresa by her handsome sexual swordsman (Richard Gere) is designed to serve as a counterpoint to the unrequited love showered on her by the enraptured James Morrissey (William Atherton), but the novelty of the contrast quickly wears off as the subjugation of Theresa becomes progressively uglier. She throws herself into cocaine-sniffing, prostituting herself for the thrill of the act, and blowing off Morrissey out of sheer spite. The schoolteacher identity is tossed...
Keaton was on the set for 76 days, playing in every scene of the film except one. Halfway through she cracked a rib when Actor Richard Gere, who plays a stud named Tony, threw her to the floor. "It was my fault," she said. "I knew how to take the fall, but I blew it. Besides, it's fun to do that wild, physical stuff. And it's nice to get really angry and scream, and then walk away from the responsibility for all that when the shooting is over...