criterioncollection:When playwright and actor Sam Shepard passed away last July at the age of sevent
criterioncollection:When playwright and actor Sam Shepard passed away last July at the age of seventy-three, his dear friend Patti Smith wrote a heart-wrenching remembrance of him for the New Yorker. In it, she mentioned a pair of tattoos they got in the seventies: a lightning bolt on her knee, and a crescent moon resting between his thumb and forefinger. A few days after his passing, I found myself revisiting Terrence Malick’s 1978 masterpiece Days of Heaven. About a quarter of the way, my breath was taken by a moment in which Shepard’s character—an ailing, wealthy man simply referred to as “the farmer”—sits on a log in the woods with his soon-to-be wife, Abbey (Brooke Adams). He tells her he loves her, places his hand on hers, and there it is, thin as a wisp and gone in an instant, that sly crescent moon.Out of Time: Sam Shepard in Days of Heaven -- source link