Badlands ***** (1973, Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates) – Classic Movie Review 2,994

Terrence Malick’s 1973 American neo-noir period crime drama film Badlands in his spectacular directorial debut. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek star as Fifties tearaways who go on a killing spree.

Writer, producer-director Terrence Malick’s downbeat but exciting and engrossing first film from 1973 Badlands stars Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in only her second film. The crime thriller story tells of two Fifties teen-and-twenty tearaways (Sheen and Spacek) from South Dakota who forge a violent path of destruction in a killing spree across the neighbouring Montana badlands.

Spacek plays the 15-year-old Holly Sargis, an impressionable teen girl from a dead-end town, who narrates the story in the style of the pulp magazines that she is constantly reading. She relates in mindless prose the deadly exploits of her James Dean lookalike, garbage-collecting older greaser boyfriend, the 25-year-old Kit Carruthers, as he first kills her father (Warren Oates) and then sets out on a mission to be remembered.

Intended partly an attack on conservative mid-West American values, Malick’s startlingly beautiful-looking thriller is the flipside to the glamour of Bonnie and Clyde. Here everything is presented as real and death is seen merely as an easy-to-dismiss consequence of life.

Both leads are magnificent, giving performances to die for, promising brilliant careers, which by and large they have had. Malick’s handling of the difficult, violent material is superb and promised a successful career that remained for so long unfulfilled after the box-office dismissal of his second film, Days of Heaven (1978), led to the 20-year wait till his next, The Thin Red Line, in 1998.

Malick’s script is fictional, but is loosely based on the 1958 killing spree of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate.

Sheen bases his acting as Kit on James Dean. Sheen recalled: ‘All of his movies had a profound effect on my life, in my work and all of my generation. He transcended cinema acting. It was no longer acting, it was human behaviour.’

Spacek recalled: ‘The chemistry was immediate. He was Kit. And with him, I was Holly.’

Badlands cinema release poster.

Principal photography took place in Colorado starting in July 1972, with a non-union crew and a low budget of $300,000. Warner Bros bought the film cheaply for under $1 million and then didn’t know what to do with it. Look at the poster. It looks much too arty for popular success. They showed it n a double bill with the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles, angering audiences. The film’s producers then booked the film into other cinemas to show it could make money, and it was the popular, praised closing feature film at the 1973 New York Film Festival, so it picked up word of mouth.

Jack Fisk is art director in his first of several films with Malick. Spacek and Fisk fell in love during production and they married on 12 April 1974.

The film is admired for its cinematography by Brian Probyn, Tak Fujimoto and Stevan Larner. It is also admired for its soundtrack. The film uses Gassenhauer from Carl Orff’s and Gunild Keetman’s Schulwerk, and tunes by Erik Satie, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Mickey & Sylvia, and James Taylor.

Sheen recalled: ‘It was mesmerising. It disarmed you. It was a period piece, and yet of all time. It was extremely American. It caught the spirit of the people, of the culture, in a way that was immediately identifiable.’

During the 1960s and early 1970s, Sheen appeared in many popular TV series, but then he played Dobbs in the 1970 film Catch-22 and starred in the Emmy Award-winning 1972 TV film That Certain Summer, a pioneering film showing homosexuality in a sympathetically.

The cast are Martin Sheen as Kit Carruthers, Sissy Spacek as Holly Sargis, Warren Oates as Father, Ramon Bieri as Cato, Alan Vint as Deputy Tom, Gary Littlejohn as Sheriff, John Carter as Rich Man, Bryan Montgomery as Boy, Gail Threlkeld as Girl, Charley Fitzpatrick as Clerk, Howard Ragsdale as Boss, John Womack Jr as Trooper, Dona Baldwin as Maid, Ben Bravo as Gas Attendant, Terrence Malick as man at rich man’s door, and Sheen’s sons Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez as boys sitting under a lamppost outside Holly’s house.

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2,994

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