Badlands

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

"He wanted to die with me and I dreamed of being lost forever in his arms." A young couple goes on a Midwest crime spree in Terrence Malick's hypnotically assured debut feature, based on the 1950s Starkweather-Fugate murders. Fancying himself a rebel like James Dean, twentysomething Kit (Martin Sheen) takes off with teen baton-twirler Holly (Sissy Spacek) after shooting her father (Warren Oates) when he tries to split the pair up. Once bounty hunters discover their riverside hiding place, Kit and Holly head toward Saskatchewan, leaving dead bodies in their wake. As the law closes in, however, Holly gives herself up -- but Kit doesn't hold it against her, as he basks in his new status as a momentary folk hero. Inaugurating the use of voice-over narration that he would continue in Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick juxtaposes Holly's flat readings of her flowery romance-novel diary prose with the banal and surreal details of their journey. Singularly inarticulate with each other, Kit and Holly are more intrigued by mythic celebrity gestures, as Holly peruses her fan magazines and Kit commemorates key moments before orchestrating a properly dramatic capture for himself (complete with the right hat). The sublime visuals lend a dreamlike beauty to the couple's trip even as their actions are treated casually; Malick neither glamorizes Kit and Holly nor consigns them to the bloody end of their fame-fixated predecessors in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). With the couple's opaque dialogue and Holly's fanzine dream narration, Malick further denies an easy explanation for their crimes. Made for under 500,000 dollars, Badlands debuted at the 1973 New York Film Festival, along with Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, and was released within months of two other outlaw-couple road movies, Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express and Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us. Although Badlands did not make an impression at the box office, its pictorial splendor and cool yet disquieting narrative established Malick as one of the most compelling artists to come out of early-'70s Hollywood. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 1
• Audio: 5.1, PCM Mono, PCM Stereo
• Screen: Pan and Scan, Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
• Subtitle: English, French
• Features:
  • [None specified]

AWARDS

• Library of Congress

•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1992

• Venice International Film Festival

•     Film Presented - 1975 (Terrence Malick)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Martin Sheen - Kit Carruthers
       Sissy Spacek - Holly Sargis
       Warren Oates - Mr. Sargis, Father
       Alan Vint - Deputy
       Ramon Bieri - Cato

• Director:

  Terrence Malick

• Producer:

  Terrence Malick

• Screenwriter:

  Terrence Malick

• Cinematographer:

  Tak Fujimoto, Stevan Larner, Brian Probyn

• Composer (Music Score):

  George Aliceson Tipton

• Featured Music:

  Erik Satie

• Editor:

  Robert L. Estrin

• Art Director:

  Jack Fisk, Ed Richardson

• Associate Producer:

  Louis A. Stroller

REVIEW:

• What could have been just another story about delinquents on the run was turned into something extraordinary by first-time director Terrence Malick. A uniquely lyrical story of violence and teenage mythos in the 1950s, Badlands is probably the most low-key film ever made about a mass murderer. Twenty-four-year-old Kit Carruthers (played to perfection by Martin Sheen) has so deeply immersed himself in the studied, affectless cool of James Dean that he appears incapable of showing emotions, while his 15-year-old girlfriend, Holly (Sissy Spacek, also excellent), is at once too baffled by Kit to know how to react and too bored and starved for attention to turn him away when he drags her along for a multi-state killing spree; their crimes seem to stem less from anger than from ennui gone wrong. Much as Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns featured amoral men in a landscape at once beautiful and desolate, Malick places his murderous couple in an American landscape both stunning and strangely barren; Kit's violence seems less an act of focused rage than a pitiful attempt to make something new of his otherwise plain surroundings, much as Holly's flowery narration tries to derive an exciting story from their arid, sordid lives. (Malick's camera crew, led by Tak Fujimoto, Steven Larner, and Brian Probyn, do brilliant work on a limited budget.) Presenting his killers without judgment (but without approval, either), Malick wrought a strange and unsettling beauty for this first chapter in his remarkable (if not prolific) film career. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

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