If the Time-Life publishers commissioned a picture book on the Great American Bread Basket, ca. World War I, they'd probably want it to look like this -- a thing you could be proud to place on your coffee table. You never know for sure what the picturesque Thomas Hart Benton laborers are doing on the Texas Panhandle farm, but they are usually doing it in lovely slanting sunlight, under deep cerulean skies, amid the stereophonic rustle of tall grain. These moving pictures seldom move very much, and they can maintain no rhythm or continuity when every other one of them knocks you flat on your back. Terrence Malick, the writer-director, appears to be getting ideas from "American scene" photographers such as Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange and painters such as Andrew Wyeth and the aforementioned Benton, and he appears, too, to be extremely careful not to allow anything disruptive or discordant to enter his immaculate images. He tries, however, to get a certain complication, or multilevel effect, by tacking other elements onto the soundtrack. There is the tremulous romanticism of the Ennio Morricone music. There is the eccentric, modernistic dialogue delivery of Richard Gere and Brooke Adams. And there is the pseudo-illiterate "folk poetry" of the narration: the twelve-year-old narrator, speaking in an aggressive Jersey City dialect despite coming from Chicago, is fond of doing redundant, cadenced paraphrases of her own sentences: "Nobody sent us letters. We didn't receive no cards" and "Nobody's perfect. There was never a perfect person around" and so on. These individual elements sit alongside one another like parallel lines, no contact, no interplay. With Sam Shepard, Linda Manz; photographed by Nestor Almendros. (1978) — Duncan Shepherd