Badlands (1973)

User Rating:

7.9/10   

Director:

Terrence Malick

Writer:

Terrence Malick (written by)

Release Date:

7 April 1975 (Sweden)

Genre:

Adventure | Crime | Drama | Romance | Thriller

Tagline:

He was 25 years old. He combed his hair like James Dean. She was 15. She took music lessons and could twirl a baton. For a while they lived together in a tree house. In 1959, she watched while he killed a lot of people.

Plot:

Dramatization of the Starkweather-Fugate killing spree of the 1950's, in which a teenage girl and her twenty-something boyfriend slaughtered her entire family and several others in the Dakota badlands.

Plot Keywords:

Killing Spree | Badlands | Murder | 1950s | James Dean

Awards:

Nominated for BAFTA Film Award. Another 3 wins

Cast

Martin Sheen	...	Kit
Sissy Spacek	...	Holly
Warren Oates	...	Father
Ramon Bieri	...	Cato
Alan Vint	...	Deputy
Gary Littlejohn	...	Sheriff
John Carter	...	Rich Man
Bryan Montgomery	...	Boy
Gail Threlkeld	...	Girl
Charles Fitzpatrick	...	Clerk
Howard Ragsdale	...	Boss
John Womack Jr.	...	Trooper
Dona Baldwin	...	Maid
Ben Bravo	...	Gas attendant

Runtime:

94 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English | Spanish

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Singapore:PG | Australia:PG | UK:15 (re-rating) (2008) | UK:18 (video rating) | Australia:M (DVD rating) | New Zealand:R16 | Finland:K-15 (re-rating) (2003) | Finland:K-16 (re-rating) (1987) | Ireland:15 | Norway:15 | Sweden:15 | USA:PG | West Germany:16 | Finland:K-18 (1980) | Portugal:M/16 (DVD rating) | UK:X (original rating)

Filming Locations:

Colorado, USA

Company:

Badlands Company

Trivia:

Sissy Spacek met her future husband, Jack Fisk, on this film.

Goofs:

Continuity: At the beginning of the movie, Kit meets Holly after a long day as a garbage man and his white t-shirt is spotless. Kit then asks Holly to take a walk with him, at which point the t-shirt is magically dirty!

Quotes:

Kit Carruthers: I shot him in the stomach.
Holly Sargis: Is he mad?
Kit Carruthers: He didn't say nothing to me about it.

Movie Connections:

Featured in Wanderlust (2006) (TV)

Soundtrack:

LOVE IS STRANGE

Poetry in motion

Terrence Malick's debut feature, an effortlessly cool take on a real-life 1950s case, stars a denim-clad Martin Sheen as rebel without a cause Kit Carruthers. Kit shoots dead the obstinate father of his teenage girlfriend Holly (Sissy Spacek), and the pair go on the run in the bleak - but under Malick's painterly eye, strangely beautiful - Dakota Badlands. Kit kills several more times as the police net closes around them.

With superbly chosen musical accompaniment by Carl Orff, among others, and wonderful cinematography, "Badlands" is firmly rooted in the tradition of the anti-heroic American road movie (thematically related movies that spring to mind include "Bonnie and Clyde", "Vanishing Point", "Sugarland Express", "Thelma and Louise", "Natural Born Killers"). But as ever Malick's poetic vision ensures that his movie thoroughly transcends the genre in which he is working. "Badlands" is simultaneously a celebration of the infinite horizon of the American road, and a chilling depiction of psychopathology in action. Kit wins you over with his considerable charm before it dawns that there is a void in his soul that enables him to kill with impunity. Sheen is outstanding in this iconic role, and Spacek just as good: she's quietly heartbreaking as the immature, fragile girl who is as unable to comprehend the implications of Kit's actions as Kit himself. Her narrative of the events as they unfold is devastatingly naive, unintentionally ironic and disturbingly funny.

Some audiences may find Malick's work cold and dispassionate because he treats the mundane and the extraordinary with the same detachment, but it's a detachment that, for me, signals Malick's passionate engagement with everything that happens, so that every single event is laden with significance, whether it is the movement of a beetle on a stalk of grass, or the killing of a man. Malick does not thereby condone Kit's violence or Holly's passive association with it, but by refraining from prosaic moralising he gives the viewer the space to respond to these characters in his/her own way, thus generating a far more unsettling experience.

A remarkable debut.