Badlands

BADLANDS is an intelligent little film. We're given characters and situations and left to make our own conclusions. Based on an actual young couple who went on a killing spree across the southwest in the late 1950s, the story has two young people doing their own thing with precious little in the way of ethics to guide them. It's interesting to note that both these kids substitute their own fantasies for any sense of order or responsibility that society may have to offer. The turning point comes when Kit and Holly decide to shuck their semblances of normal life for whatever their fantasies provide which, unfortunately, can't sustain them. Sheen's Kit is full of swagger and bravado; it's almost easy for someone to see him committing robberies and serial murders. Spacek's Holly is more intriguing: a soft, vanilla, invisible girl from a respectable, emotionally detached home, she seemingly possesses little in the way of what one would associate with a violent criminal. Yet, she accompanies Kit, with nothing in the way of reservations or regret. The chance to fulfill her vapid, movie magazine fantasies, if only by hiding out in the woods and applying makeup, seem infinitely more palatable than her dull existence twirling batons in her yard(it's interesting to note that one of the few things she takes away from her home is a highly romanticized, Maxfield Parrish print). These misguided illusions, along with her adolescent love for Kit, keep her going to the end. A worthwhile exploration of the bland, vacant American sensibility that values appearances or passive, benign behavior over real ethics and personal morality. And definitely more relevant as the years have passed.

It's really a shame that Terrence Malick didn't have the brilliant career he deserved at Hollywood. Shot with a nearly shoestring budget, "Badlands" remains one of the most dazzling debut movies of all time. Malick's legend based on his (long) absence has helped it to become a cult-movie. Inspired by a tragic short news item which took place in 1959 (a young couple who decides to commit a series of free murders to leave a mark in history), the odds are that Malick's first feature-length movie inspired Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino for their dangerous and irresponsible "Natural Born Killers" (1994). Concerning Tarantino, I read an interview about him in which he expressed his admiration of Malick's work. It shows that the author of "Pulp Fiction" (1994) has a great esteem for this talented and mysterious film-maker. At the same time, we can also note down that Malick's work inspired Bruce "the Boss" Springsteen two songs: "Badlands" on his "darkness on the edge of town" album (1978) and "nebraska" on the eponymous LP(1982).

An American journalist had written that "Badlands" was the best mastered movie in the history of cinema since "Citizen Kane" (1941) by Orson Welles. One can judge this affirmation as exaggerated but it is nevertheless indisputable that Malick's opus strikes on numerous aspects: an assertive and opaque story, a fluid making, a relevant screenplay, an original photography which gives to the landscapes an image of desolation and lost paradise perturbed by a free violence. The work is also strongly steeped in a certain poetry.

Concerning the two main characters, a French critic had written that it was difficult to feel liking for these two irresponsible. I think that this critic badly analyzed the film. Terrence Malick doesn't try to make them likable to us. He describes them without kindness and condescension. They haven't got an imposing personality and live only through an intermediary myth. It is particularly obvious for the young man (Martin Sheen) who is obsessed with James Dean. One can also say that Sissi Spacek's voice-over which tells this dramatic story is of an amazing neutrality. Then, unlike many criminal lovers, Sheen and Spacek will live at the heart of this violence and the latter won't bring them together or take them away.

With "Badlands", Malick was judicious for the choice of the actors. In a way, his first movie enabled to put Sheen and Spacek on the map and it also launched their respective careers. Then, what happened to Terrence Malick after this sensational debut movie? A second movie, "Days of Heaven" (1978) starring Richard Gere as successful as "Badlands". After that, for twenty years, nothing. However, in 1998, Malick made a rather successful come-back with "the Thin Red Line" (1998). According to the latest news, he would currently shoot a movie about the first years of America's colonization in the beginning of the seventeenth century. If my memory serves me well, the movie will be released next year. Let's hope so...

Like this?try these....

"gun crazy" ,Joseph H.Lewis ,1950

"you only live once" Fritz Lang,1936

"Bonnie and Clyde" Arthur Penn,1967

It has been said that Badlands was in part a reaction to the romanticising of deviance and criminality in films such as Bonnie and Clyde. In that film the protagonists were played by two fabulous-looking, charismatic (not to mention talented) actors. I came away feeling that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow would have been great fun to hang around with--dangerous, sexy fun.

Badlands is not like that. Sure, no-one would really want to be like or spend time with Kit Carruthers (based directly on fifties killer Charles Starkweather). But I was troubled by several aspects of this stunningly put together film. Essentially, it is fine craftsmanship created around a very difficult subject with little exploration of the characters, their motivations or the consequences of their actions. What remains for the viewer but a kind of detached voyeurism?

Cruel and cowardly, Charlie Starkweather was full of self-loathing, believed himself a failure and felt his life was doomed to misery. Murder is a simple act that even the sub-intelligent can commit, but it has staggering consequences. Having killed, Starkweather changed; in a way he grew. He felt himself to have achieved something. It completed the sad story that was his life.

Kit Carruthers, on the other hand, slouches, mumbles and poses throughout Badlands. We know almost nothing of his past. Of course, the narrative follows Holly's point of view, but since she appears to be in a dream and virtually clueless throughout the whole affair, how useful is this narrative method? At the end Kit is pretty much his same inscrutable self as at the beginning, except now he is famous. He's kinda cool and he knows it. When he kills it's as if he has met some unpleasant but important obligation that only he is qualified for. The murders themselves are sterilised, just a bang and the victim quietly lies down. The sets and locations are picturesque, the actors are picturesque, the murders are picturesque...

The 1957 film In Cold Blood is a gripping example of what can be achieved when something of the nature of spree/serial killers is explored, when the consequences of their actions is stark and real, and when the people inside them are glimpsed. (And there are people inside, badly damaged and loathsome, but fascinating.)

In January, 1958, nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather and fourteen-year-old Caril Ann Fugate went on a murder spree in Nebraska and Wyoming. Eleven innocent people died. Most, though not all, of the killings were random. Starkweather and Fugate's story "inspired" several films, including this one.

In "Badlands", the pair's names were changed to Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) and Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek), and their ages were altered slightly. From what I have read, Starkweather and Fugate were emotionally detached and casual about the killings, especially Charles, once the initial murders had occurred. Both Sheen and Spacek do a good job of mimicking this nonchalant attitude. At various points throughout the film, Holly narrates the story in an emotionless, monotone voice. It's like she's reading a diary of what happened as we, the viewers, watch movie footage of the events.

The film's title is appropriate, given that the characters' inner lives must surely have been wastelands, and given that the film's plot takes place mostly outdoors, on the lonesome High Plains, with its brooding and "stark" landscape.

The film's color cinematography conveys a mood of desolation, especially in those scenes that contain little more than the horizon, expansive blue sky, treeless plains, and a couple of lonely desperados. At one point, the color morphs into sepia-tinted images of small town America, as the whole country, in fear, takes up arms against the fugitives, a photographic change that renders an almost documentary tone to the film.

From time to time, classical background music accompanies the senseless violence, a cinematic contrast so "stark" as to make the film surreal. And, of course, the sequence toward the end where Kit and Holly, with car radio on, dance in the headlights as Nat King Cole sings "A Blossom Fell", is truly mournful and haunting.

"Badlands" is incredibly understated and low-key, as detached as the characters portrayed. Director Terrence Malick conveys a simple, uninvolved story, packaged in a film that makes no effort to communicate either symbolism or thematic depth. Nor does the film render judgments about the characters or events. It's an approach that probably wouldn't work today. But it is effective, and through the years the film has gradually become more respected as an excellent character study of 1950's teen rebels without a cause.

I watched this movie many years ago, not knowing what they based it on and not knowing exactly where it would go. And by the time I watched, both leads had gone on to bigger and better things, so that made it attractive.

So I sat through a miserable movie with Martin Sheen saying a lot of stupid things. If they wanted to make the character based on the person he was based on, they succeeded.

In a way, they managed to glorify their perverse life, which simply panders to the worst instincts in some people. Watching it once was once too many.

But this was somewhat of a trend in the 70s. Exploitation and a fascination with violence which has grown out of control in film.