Badlands

Director & Writer: Terrence Malick
Cast: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek. Warren Oates

IMDB

Badlands (1973) is the remarkable and impressive directorial debut from twenty-nine year old director Terrence Malick (who also scripted and produced the film). [Malick's first scripted film Pocket Money (1972) was just a year earlier.] Malick's independent film's engaging story about a delinquent duo was loosely based and inspired by the Charles Starkweather-Caril Ann Fugate mass murders (eleven in total, including his accomplice girlfriend's mother, stepfather and 2 year-old sister) of 1958 in Lincoln, Nebraska and Colorado. [Nineteen year old, James Dean-fixated Starkweather was joined by his fourteen year-old girlfriend during their nine-day flight. Once apprehended, Starkweather was electrocuted for his crimes on June 25, 1958 and Fugate was sentenced to a life sentence - although she was released on parole after 18 years.] Their exploits were first fictionalized in the film The Sadist (1963), and then displayed in the 1993 TV docudrama Murder in the Heartland. Their spree also inspired Oliver Stone's film Natural Born Killers (1994).

This unique, coming-of-age crime film with its intense and prosaic character study of the two leads, without clearly condemning or praising their horrific and pathological actions, is carefully and realistically photographed at a leisurely pace by Tak Fujimoto. As a title, Badlands is both a geographic area and a descriptive indictment of the senseless behaviors (and empty interiors) of the two juveniles. The film received no Academy Award nominations.

Only a few other directors have done so well with their debut film - e.g., Orson Welles with Citizen Kane (1941), Delbert Mann with Marty (1955), Jerome Robbins with West Side Story (1961), Steven Spielberg with Sugarland Express (1973) (another lovers-on-the-run film), Robert Redford with Ordinary People (1980), James L. Brooks with Terms of Endearment (1983), Kevin Costner with Dances with Wolves (1990), and Sam Mendes with American Beauty (1999).

The intelligent, understated, alienating and disturbing film, set in the waning years of the highly-romanticized 50's decade, is narrated in a flat, heartless, unsensational monotone voice by the film's emotionally-immature, passive, childlike and naive 15 year-old character named Holly. [Her sleepy, descriptive narration, sometimes uncomprehending of what is happening to her, is probably delivered as a retrospective, nostalgic reflection some months or years later, or as a running commentary, or as mundane quotes from her daily journal. Her imperfect memory and her addiction to mindless movie magazines influence the tone of her version of events.] She accompanies the rebellious, aimless anti-hero killer Kit, an inarticulate James Dean look-alike and ex-garbage collector, on a senseless homicidal spree from her small South Dakota hometown. One of the film's posters described the alienated, unstable and banal young couple who ensure their immortality through unplanned or unintentional murders:

He was 25 years old - He combed his hair like James Dean - He was very fastidious - People who littered bothered him -
She was 15 - She took music lessons and could twirl a baton - She wasn't very popular at school - For awhile they lived together in a tree house.

In 1959, she watched while he killed a lot of people.

Many other films since the mid-30s have told the tale of two estranged young fugitives who are mad lovers (amour fou) on the run - Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937) with Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney, Persons in Hiding (1938) with Patricia Morison and J. Carrol Naish, Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1949) with Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell, the ultimate B-picture Gun Crazy (1949) with John Dall and Peggy Cummins, Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972) starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us (1974) - a remake of Ray's film with Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall, Guncrazy (1992) starring Drew Barrymore and James LeGros, Tony Scott's True Romance (1993) (that borrowed George Tipton's score from this film), and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994) with Juliette Lewis and Woody Harrelson.

Review by Tom Dirks
Filmsite

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