Badlands (1973)........competed with two other films that dealt with the same basic story......young lovers who become partners in crime, with the long arm of the law hot on their heels.
We barely remember a single thing about Robert Altman's 1974 Thieves Like Us, so we'll keep out mouth shut on that one until we find a venue to re-watch it. Steven Spielberg's first theatrical film, 1974's The Sugarland Express still remains vividly in our memory. It served as a rapid-fire, dazzling showcase for the then young director's superb craftsmanship and his perfect framing of every camera shot for maximum impact.
Terence Malick's Badlands, which went into general release around the same time as these two competitors, was a different animal altogether.
It slowly seduced you. It snuck up on you. And by the time it finished, you'd realize you'd been enthralled by a bizarre, disturbing story, told like a slowly enfolding broad daylight nightmare.
If ever there was a film that defined the well worn phrase 'the banality of evil', it was this one. Malick scripted his directorial debut as a thinly fictionalized account of the infamous Charles Starkweather and sweetheart Caril Fugate. In 1957 the two midwestern teen sociopaths went on a random cross country killing spree that left 11 people dead.
When finally caught, Starkweather took a fast track to the electric chair wile Fugate, who claimed to be his unwilling innocent hostage, stayed in prison for over 17 years before freed on parole.
Nobody really believed Fugate's story, but evidently Malick swallowed some of it......he has the film narrated by 'Holly', his version of Fugate (Sissy Spacek), depicting her as a mostly emotionless blank slate who lives inside her own head.
Given her naivete and wide eyed innocence, it's easy to see how Holly falls under the spell of 'Kit', the Starkweather character scarily embodied by Martin Sheen in one of his finest first roles.
With a hair trigger temper and a resemblance to James Dean, Kit beguiles the easily impressed Holly. And after shooting Holly's disapproving father (Warren Oates), the two are off and running, with the bodies piling up along the way.
What's truly haunting and stays with you forever is Malick's dispassionate direction (similar to Kubrick's), as Kit and Holly move across barren, flat American landscapes, barely registering the destroyed lives they leave in their wake.
And Sheen and Spacek bring these characters to life with a documentary-like precision that's truly unnerving to behold.
Unlike the real Starkweather, who murdered savagely, Sheen's Kit shoots people down with a quick ruthless efficiency, as if he can't wait to get it over with. And unlike Fugate, Spacek's Holly is neither a terrified hostage nor (as Starkweather claimed) an active participant. She's just a not very bright teenage girl along for ride, her fantasies fueled by movie magazines and Nat King Cole love songs.
After awhile, you realize you're not watching the Starkweather-Fugate story, but rather a cold, remote vision of 1950's America as seen through a warped mirror that displays what nobody wants to look at very long....the dark heart of the American dream gone astray.
It's brilliant, 4 star (****) filmmaking and a a rare chance to enjoy Terence Malick's talent from long before he crawled deep into his own ego to crank out unseen, unwatchable movies.
We say no movie buff should miss it.
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