When Terrence Malick made Days of Heaven, he still had a lot of Badlands in him. Once again, he turned a vast land into a stage for a kind of plainsman's Shakespearean drama. But where Badlands was chilling in its beauty, Days of Heaven's belle époque tale is bathed in the warm light of a mythical time when poverty sometimes had hope. Shooting in Canada, cinematographer Nestor Almendros, in his first American feature, captures an American landscape where Vermeer and Walker Evans meet. As in Badlands, the story is saved from either truth or fiction by its disingenuous narrator, Linda Manz as the kid sister to a husband and wife team (Richard Gere and Brooke Adams) who, posing as brother and sister, deceive and murder a wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard).