“I’m a tough little rebel.” — Linda Manz

Days of Heaven (1978)

It’s her birthday today.

Manz died on August 14, 2020. She was HUGE to me growing up, and I have written about it on occasion. She didn’t work all that much, but her performances meant so much to me, spoke to me as a young tomboy girl. It was the era of the Tough Little Girls, and it was truly glorious (if you were a little girl then who wasn’t drawn to girlie things). So I’ve written quite a bit about her, about her performances, but also about What She Meant To Me.

First up: The major piece I wrote was for Film Comment on Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue, where she plays a young troubled girl, obsessed with both Elvis and Sid Vicious.

Out of the Blue (1983)

Her obsession has the whiff of death about it. Her whole life is death-haunted. Her only escape is her rock ‘n roll idols. Her room is a shrine to Elvis. She dresses like Elvis. She slicks her hair, she wears leather, she swaggers across the school fields.

Out of the Blue (1983)

And yet, at the same time, she is at the age when she is starting to experimenting with femininity. There’s an extraordinary scene where she – hair slicked back like Elvis – smears on lipstick. Her mother keeps begging her to dress like a girl, to get boys’ attentions. So she gives it a shot. She looks so YOUNG.

Out of the Blue (1983)

Linda Manz came up again in the first piece I linked to above about tomboy movies, an era I was fortunate to grow up in because the models for girlhood were little gangster tomboys. I had that vibe, it was very attractive to me, as was any story where girls dressed up as boys in order to disguise they were girls for safety/survival reasons. I didn’t want to be a boy. I wanted to be BOTH. The ultimate fantasy was to be one of Fagin’s little thieves, but I was actually a girl disguised as a boy. I didn’t question any of this, but the fantasies were vivid! The next best thing was getting cast as the Artful Dodger in the school play when I was 11.

Linda Manz didn’t play as many roles as, say, Jodie Foster or Tatum O’Neal – but she left a DEEP mark.

Days of Heaven (1978)

I still had more to say about tomboys, so I listed all of my inspirations for this, the performances and movies that made such an enormous impact on me, as well as the research for context.

Days of Heaven (1978)

One more thing: Days of Heaven. She’s not just an actress in the film. She is the storyteller, and she does one of THE great voiceover narrations of all-time. It’s not like any other voiceover (that I’m aware of) in existence. Terrence Malick asked her to watch the movie and just riff, improvise, make shit up. And that’s what he did. Days of Heaven is incomprehensible without her narration. I wrote a piece about Days of Heaven when it screened at Ebertfest.

Days of Heaven (1978)

Here’s the opening sequence of Days of Heaven, with the start of her voiceover. Keep in mind: she, the child, was standing in a recording booth, watching the movie unfold before her, and just making it up off the cuff.

How Linda Manz came onto my radar – since I wasn’t watching Days of Heaven when I was 10 years old – was her appearance in a television movie called Orphan Train. Oh my GOD that movie had everything I wanted and loved as a child. Children without parents (I loved my parents, but I LOVED orphan stories), raggedy late 1800s/early 1900s clothing, there’s a girl who dresses as a boy – I dressed as a boy, and I loved cross-dressing stories (one of the reasons Shakespeare’s comedies “resonated” with me so hard) – there’s a fledgling romance, as well as a gripping story of orphans being saved from destitution. Oliver Twist on a train. I was obsessed and Manz was a huge part of it.

Orphan Train (1979)

And here’s the piece I wrote when she died.

I loved her so much. Great child actress, one of the very best.