Themes: Crime Sprees, Lovers on the Lam, Thrill Crime
Main Cast: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates, Alan Vint, Ramon Bieri
Release Year: 1973
Country: US
Run Time: 95 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG
Plot
"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
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
Gary Littlejohn - Sheriff; Terrence Malick - Salesman; John Carter - Rich Man; Dona Baldwin - Maid; Ben Bravo - Gas Station Attendant; Charles Fitzpatrick - Clerk; Howard Ragsdale - Boss; John Womack Jr. - Trooper on plane
Credit
Jack Fisk - Art Director, Ed Richardson - Art Director, Louis A. Stroller - Associate Producer, Terrence Malick - Director, Robert L. Estrin - Editor, Edward R. Pressman - Executive Producer, George Aliceson Tipton - Composer (Music Score), Tak Fujimoto - Cinematographer, Stevan Larner - Cinematographer, Brian Probyn - Cinematographer, William P. Scott - Production Manager, Terrence Malick - Producer, James Nelson - Sound/Sound Designer, Terrence Malick - Screenwriter, Erik Satie - Featured Music
Badlands is narrated from the perspective of Holly (Spacek), a teenaged girl living in a dead-end South Dakota town. One day she meets Kit (Sheen), a rebellious young greaser who sweeps her off her feet and takes her as his accomplice on a cross-country killing spree. Holly's narration, describing her adventures with Kit with romantic clichés, is juxtaposed with the grim reality of Kit's sociopathic appetite for grisly violence. This use of voice-over to create a dialectic between sound and image has become a dominant feature of Malick's work.
Malick began work on Badlands after his second year as a student at the American Film Institute. "I wrote and, at the same time, developed a kind of sales kit with slides and video tape of actors, all with a view to presenting investors with something that would look ready to shoot," Malick said. "To my surprise, they didn't pay too much attention to it; they invested on faith. I raised about half the money and [executive producer] Edward Pressmen the other half."[2]
Principal photography took place in the summer of 1972, beginning in July, with a non-union crew and a considerably low budget of $300,000 (excluding some deferments to film labs and actors).[2]
Though Malick paid close attention to period detail, he did not want it to overwhelm the picture. "I tried to keep the 1950's to a bare minimum," he said. "Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time."[2]
Malick also pointed out that "Kit and Holly even think of themselves as living in a fairy tale", and he felt that was very appropriate as "children's books like Treasure Island were often filled with violence." He also hoped a "fairy tale" tone would "take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality."[2]
Warner Brothers eventually purchased and distributed the completed film for a sum just under a million dollars.[2]
"Malick's 1973 first feature is a film so rich in ideas it hardly knows where to turn", wrote Dave Kehr for The Chicago Reader. "Transcendent themes of love and death are fused with a pop-culture sensibility and played out against a midwestern background, which is breathtaking both in its sweep and in its banality." [5]
Spacek later said that Badlands changed the whole way she thought about filmmaking. "After working with Terry Malick, I was like, 'The artist rules. Nothing else matters.' My career would have been very different if I hadn't had that experience".[6] In subsequent years, Sheen would often cite Badlands as his best work.
In 1993, Badlands was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
