Badlands (film)

Holly Sargis is a 15-year-old girl living in Fort Dupree, a dead-end South Dakota town. She has a strained relationship with her father, a sign painter, since her mother's death from pneumonia years earlier. Holly meets Kit Carruthers, a 25-year-old garbage collector, troubled greaser and Korean War veteran. He resembles James Dean, an actor whom Holly admires. After Kit charms Holly, she falls in love and loses her virginity to him. As Holly falls deeper in love with Kit, his violent and anti-social tendencies start to reveal themselves.

Holly's father disapproves of her relationship with Kit and kills her dog as punishment for spending time with him. Kit breaks into Holly's house and insists she run away with him. When her father protests and threatens to call the police, Kit shoots him dead. After Kit and Holly fake suicide by burning down the house, they head for the badlands of Montana. They build a tree house in a remote area and live there happily, fishing and stealing chickens for food. They flee after being found by three bounty hunters whom Kit shoots dead. They seek refuge with Kit's former co-worker Cato, but when he attempts to summon help, Kit kills him too. Kit forces a young couple who arrive to visit Cato into a storm cellar. He shoots into the cellar and leaves without checking to see if they are dead.

Kit and Holly are pursued across the Midwest by law enforcement. They stop at a rich man's mansion and take supplies, clothing and his Cadillac, but spare the lives of the man and his housemaid. As they drive across Montana to Saskatchewan, the police find and chase them.

Holly grows tired of Kit and life on the lam. She refuses to keep running and turns herself in. Kit leads the police on a car chase but is soon caught. He charms the arresting officers and National Guard troops, tossing them his personal belongings as souvenirs of his crime spree. Kit is executed for his crimes; Holly receives probation and marries her defense attorney's son.

In addition, uncredited appearances were made by director Malick as the man at the Rich Man's door, and by lead actor Sheen's sons Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez as two boys sitting under a lamppost outside Holly's house.

Malick, a protégé of Arthur Penn (whom he thanked in the film's end credits),[7] began work on Badlands after his second year attending the American Film Institute.[8] In 1970, Malick, at age 27, began working on the screenplay during a road trip.[9] "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 Pressman the other half."[8] Malick paid $25,000 of his own funds. The remainder of his share was raised from professionals such as doctors and dentists. Badlands was the first feature film that Malick had written for himself to direct.[9]

Sissy Spacek, in only her second film, was the first actor cast. Malick found her small-town Texas roots and accent were perfect for the part of the naive impressionable high school girl. The director included her in his creative process, asking questions about her life "as if he were mining for gold." When he found out she had been a majorette, he worked a twirling routine into the script.[10]

Several up-and-coming actors were auditioned for the part of Kit Carruthers. When Martin Sheen was suggested by the casting director, Malick was hesitant, thinking he was too old for the role. Spacek wrote in her autobiography that "the chemistry was immediate. He was Kit. And with him, I was Holly." [11]

Principal photography took place in Colorado starting in July 1972, with a non-union crew and a low budget of $300,000 (excluding some deferments to film labs and actors).[8] The film had a somewhat troubled production history: several members of the crew clashed with Malick, and another was severely injured when an explosion occurred while filming the fire scene.[12][13] The Frank G. Bloom House in Trinidad was used for the rich man's house. The script's beginning was mostly filmed in the southeastern Colorado towns of La Junta and Las Animas, including the scene in which Holly runs out of the latter town's Columbian Elementary School.[14] The closing credits thank the people of Otero County, Colorado "for their help and cooperation."

Jack Fisk served as art director for the film in his first of several collaborations with the director. During production, Sissy Spacek and Fisk fell in love [15] and were married on April 12, 1974.

The film was originally set to be edited by Robert Estrin. When Malick saw Estrin's cut of the film, he disliked it and removed him from the production. Malick and Billy Weber recut the movie. Estrin remains credited as the sole editor, however, with Weber credited as associate editor.[12] Both Weber and art designer Jack Fisk worked on all of Malick's subsequent features through 2016 (The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, Knight of Cups).[16]

Though Malick paid close attention to period detail, he did not want it to overwhelm the picture. "I tried to keep the 1950s 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."[8] At a news conference coinciding with the film's festival debut, Malick called Kit "so desensitized that [he] can regard the gun with which he shoots people as a kind of magic wand that eliminates small nuisances."[3] Malick also pointed out that "Kit and Holly even think of themselves as living in a fairy tale", and he felt was appropriate since "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."[8]

Warner Bros. eventually purchased and distributed the film for just under $1 million.[8] Warner Bros. initially previewed the film on a double bill with the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles, resulting in very negative audience response. The production team was forced to book the film into several other theaters, in locations such as Little Rock, Arkansas, to demonstrate that the film could make money.[12]

The film makes repeated use of the short composition Gassenhauer from Carl Orff's and Gunild Keetman's Schulwerk, and also uses other tunes by Erik Satie, Nat "King" Cole, Mickey & Sylvia and James Taylor.[17]

Badlands was the closing feature film at the 1973 New York Film Festival,[3] reportedly "overshadowing even Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets."[18] Vincent Canby, who saw the film at the festival debut, called it a "cool, sometimes brilliant, always ferociously American film"; according to Canby, "Sheen and Miss Spacek are splendid as the self-absorbed, cruel, possibly psychotic children of our time, as are the members of the supporting cast, including Warren Oates as Holly's father. One may legitimately debate the validity of Malick's vision, but not, I think, his immense talent. Badlands is a most important and exciting film."[3] In April 1974, Jay Cocks wrote that the film "might better be regarded less as a companion piece to Bonnie and Clyde than as an elaboration and reply. It is not loose and high-spirited. All its comedy has a frosty irony, and its violence, instead of being brutally balletic, is executed with a dry, remorseless drive."[7] According to executive producer Edward Pressman, apart from Canby's New York Times review, most initial reviews of the film were negative, but its reputation with critics improved over time.[12] David Thomson conversely reported that the work was "by common consent [...] one of the most remarkable first feature films made in America."[19]

Writing years later for The Chicago Reader, Dave Kehr wrote: "Malick's 1973 first feature is a film so rich in ideas it hardly knows where to turn. 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."[20] 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".[21] In 2003, Bill Paxton said: "It had a lyricism that films have only once in a while, moments of a transcendental nature.... There's this wonderful sequence where the couple have been cut adrift from civilisation. They know the noose is tightening and they've gone off the road, across the Badlands. You hear Sissy narrating various stories, and she's talking about visiting faraway places. There's this strange piece of classical music [an ethereal orchestration of Erik Satie's Trois Morceaux en forme de Poire], and a very long-lens shot. You see something in the distance – I think it's a train moving – and it looks like a shot of an Arabian caravan moving across the desert. These are moments that have nothing to do with the story, and yet everything to do with it. They're not plot-orientated, but they have to do with the longing or the dreams of these characters. And they're the kind of moments you never forget, a certain kind of lyricism that just strikes some deep part of you and that you hold on to."[22]

The film has a 98% "Certified Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an average score of 8.89/10 based on the reviews of 53 critics, with the general consensus being "Terrence Malick's debut is a masterful slice of American cinema, rife with the visual poetry and measured performances that would characterize his work."[23] On Metacritic, the film holds a weighted score of 93/100 based on 19 reviews, indicating "Universal acclaim".[24] Variety stated that the film was an "impressive" debut.[16] Roger Ebert added it to his "Great Movies" list in 2011.[16][25]

Martin Sheen commented in 1999 that Badlands "still is" the best script he had ever read.[9] He wrote that "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."[9]

• List of American films of 1973
• United States in the 1950s
• List of films considered the best

• Badlands at IMDb
• Badlands at AllMovie
• Badlands at the TCM Movie Database
• Badlands at the American Film Institute Catalog
• Badlands: Misfits an essay by Michael Almereyda at the Criterion Collection
• Richard Brody's review of the 1973 classic at The New Yorker
• "Badlands", essay by Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, A&C Black, 2010 ISBN 0826429777, pages 697–699