DVD details for
Days of Heaven (1978) More at IMDbPro »

Michel Hafner (24 July 1999):
This DVD edition from Paramount of Terrence Malick's famous film "Days of Heaven" is a disappointment. The film has been released on 70 mm when it came out. The reason is the gorgeous photography. Unfortunately this DVD does not do justice to the film.
The disc is compromised right from the start with the choice of an inappropriate film master. The problem is the noise/grain level which is distractingly high. There is also no shortage of speckles, and image stability is not optimal. That alone could still have built the basis for a pretty good DVD, if the rest would be state of the art, but it's not.
What prevents this DVD from being pretty bad is good color reproduction, nice constrast and ok sharpness (but at the lower end for a 16:9 enhanced transfer). These can't make up though for the problems related to the noise level and a not state of the art transfer and film master.
First, the grain causes some problems with the compression. It gets distorted and amplified despite a high average bit rate of 6 MBit/s. Second, the noise must have displeased the people in charge, too, it seems, since they reached for that magic device called "digital noise removal". But without paying attention to the small print: "Video surgeon general's warning - overindulgence in digital noise removal may be detrimental to your image quality". Yes, this DVD suffers from noise removal artifacts. Textures get smeared when in motion and show quite an unnatural appearance at many occasions. A shot for studying this is in chapter 5 at 7:12-7:45. Watch the faces of Richard Gere and Brooke Adams and see what the noise removal and the compression does to them. Pretty ugly and distracting on larger display systems that are quite able of showing you this in all its "glory". The compression suffers further from I-frame pulsing.
Finally, it seems that the people in charge were also not too happy with image sharpness and reached yet again for another magical device, the "digital image sharpener", also known by the name "digital edge enhancer". The result here is that images are still rather fuzzy for a 16:9 disc, but now have also ugly white outlines around many objects. Sigh. What where they thinking? Not much, it seems.
Another prime example of how not to master DVDs. A pity that this wonderful film is now only available on a compromised DVD. It should be remastered from a new second generation interpositive. The sooner the better. Or at least keep the fingers away from the digital toys, and encode with 9 MBit/s on a dual layer disc, so the film grain is looking as natural as possible in this context, and digital artifacts are absent. Until this happens, I can not recommend this disc to anybody who is looking for high image quality.

One-of-a-kind filmmaker-philosopher Terrence Malick has created some of the most visually arresting movies of the twentieth century, and his glorious period tragedy Days of Heaven, featuring Oscar-winning cinematography by Nestor Almendros, stands out among them. In 1910, a Chicago steel worker (Richard Gere) accidentally kills his supervisor and flees to the Texas panhandle with his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) and little sister (Linda Manz) to work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer (Sam Shepard). A love triangle, a swarm of locusts, a hellish fire—Malick captures it all with dreamlike authenticity, creating at once a timeless American idyll and a gritty evocation of turn-of-the-century labor.