Of all the news about death and destruction in this year of the
plague and civil unrest (200,000 due to COVID alone), none sent
a chill down my spine like the passing of actress Linda Manz.
She apparently died of cancer this week. She had a sporadic
career in cinema, with her early roles in _The Wanderer_, _Out
of the Blue_, and _Days of Heaven_ being the most celebrated.
Despite that, or perhaps because the diminutive actress has
burnt her imprint into our collective memory through just
a few iconic, child-like roles, she has become an immortal.
Even the NYT gave her a glowing obituary.

I myself will always think of her as "Linda" in _Days of Heaven_.
In the 1976 screenplay, this character was "Ursula" and was older;
she was like the eventual Linda's boarding school friend. Manz
made the street urchin-turned heiress character her own, and
even improvised the glancing angle monologues that were the heart
of the film. Considering how prophetic her words turned out to
be -- the hellfire prophecy as they arrived at the Farm, the wiser
moral relativism at the end -- this was astounding, like an
unscripted planets-in-alignment.

The title of _Days of Heaven_ predicts the Fall. Men and beast
at work and at play, running around; the changing of the seasons;
the succession of bountiful harvests and locust plagues; they
all seemed part and parcel of the fabric of a universe supremely
indifferent to any man's or woman's fate. No film laid bare the
transient nature of our existence quite like this. The surpassing
beauty of the cinematography only emphasized that we remained
outside of Nature, whose fullness of being has always been
impervious to our sense of justice, morality, yearning for
permanence. Of the actors in the film, Robert Wiike (the Foreman)
passed away in 1989. Sam Shepard followed in 2017; his accursed
Farmer character did not even survive the film. Neither did Richard
Gere's. But Linda Manz's young girl was meant to live forever;
she should be running around, going on adventures, never growing
old. When the actress died, a small part of the universe seemed
to have perished with her.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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