Badlands (1973)

[wmcclain]

Badlands (1973), written, produced and directed by Terrence Malick.

Cast your mind back to adolescence. Little bit crazy, were you? Afraid you might launch off into some extreme bad behavior? But you were in love, awkward but pure. Until it ended.

That's the story of Kit and Holly, if you throw in the extra craziness that lets them casually murder a whole string of family, friends and strangers, and then camp out in the woods in a survivalist compound that combines Gilligan's Island with Lost.

Even her father (the great Warren Oates) is crazy: he shoots her dog to punish her!

Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek are young, fresh and convincing. Just guessing, but I suspect the director did not rely on storyboards: there seem to be many scenes found during the shoot, maybe bits of improvisation.

Spacek had only a brief ingenue period before developing her exotic look, but she is improbably cute in little white shorts here.

After first sex:

Holly: Did it go the way it's supposed to?

Kit: Yeah.

Holly: Is that all there is to it?

Kit: Yep.

Holly: Gosh, what was everybody talkin' about?

Kit: Don't ask me.

Holly: Well, I'm glad it's over. For a while I was afraid I might die before it happened. Had a wreck or some deal like that.

I love her dim, romantically overblown diary narration.

Ironic twist: when finally captured, Kit and the police are similar people. They like each other in the end.

The score, using bits of Carl Orff, is initially childlike, becoming darker and psychotic as the story changes but the characters don't.

Malick's first film, begun when he was a student. The story is suggested by the history of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate in 1958. Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers is an absurd treatment of the same material, much less watchable than Badlands.

Available on Blu-ray from Criterion. Excellent natural color.

[Intrepid37]

I feel that Martin Sheen is a little too pretty for this part.

Arch Hall Jr. in The Sadist - now that was perfect casting.

Of course, Sissy is nowhere close to the psycho portrayal of Marilyn Manning, who plays it just as quietly as Sissy, but conveys much greater evil.

[HoldenIsHere]

I like BADLANDS, but one thing I find distracting is the Southern (or more accurately South Midland) accent that Martin Sheen uses in the movie.
Sissy Spacek's accent is explained by stating early that her character Holly was from Texas, but Martin Shhen's character is supposed to be a native of South Dakota.

It's probably just a shorthand way to sound "rural," but it's not accurate.

Hilary Swank uses a similar accent for her character in BOYS DON'T CRY. She plays a real-life person who was born and raised in Nebraska, but she inexplicably use a Texas-like accent for the role. It's especially annoying because her character is based on real life character (with actual names used in the movie unlike the fictitious names used in BADLANDS), and there is documentary interview footage of people who were from the same area as the real person as well as some audio recordings of the real person's voice.

[HoldenIsHere]

Holden, I noticed that the actors in the wonderful film NEBRASKA also have something that sounds similar to a Southern accent (Kentucky, West Virginia, parts of Tennessee) with the edges rounded off a bit. Like you,I prefer for films set in a particular area to feature that kind of accent.

kingrat, the sweetie and I saw BADLANDS on Watch TCM this weekend. It was the sweetie's first time viewing and one comment about Martin Sheen's character Kit (and a few others including the guy who told Kit he was fired from his trash collecting job): "This is supposed to be South Dakota. Why do they sound Southern?"

We both liked Sissy Spacek's narration line: "Sometimes I wished Kit would fall in the river and drown so I could watch."

Anyway, here's some examples of the speech patterns of people born and raised in South Dakota. They don't have an accent like the one Martin Sheen used in BADLANDS.