Badlands (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Badlands opens in Fort Dupree, a dead-end South Dakota town. A fifteen-year-old girl narrates her own story, calmly, in voice-over. She has just taken up with a garbage collector who looks like James Dean. Terrence Malick's 1973 film draws loosely from the real murder spree of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, in 1958. Malick was a protégé of Arthur Penn, and this was his first feature. The film closed the 1973 New York Film Festival, reportedly overshadowing even Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. It had a fraught production, three different cinematographers, and an initial preview that drew a very negative audience response. What Malick was actually trying to build is worth tracing. So is how a film that started so roughly became a fixture of American cinema.

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• 2. Outside Time

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  Malick said at the festival that Kit was 'so desensitized' that shooting people made him like a man with 'a kind of magic wand.' Those he killed were, to him, mere 'small nuisances.' That phrase cuts to the core of Malick's design. He wanted no conventional crime film moored in 1950s nostalgia. 'Nostalgia is a powerful feeling,' he said. 'It can drown out anything.' His goal was a picture that felt 'outside time,' structured like a fairy tale. He noted that Kit and Holly 'even think of themselves as living in a fairy tale.' Malick located that impulse in literary tradition. Children's books like Treasure Island, he observed, 'were often filled with violence.' The fairy tale frame would, he hoped, 'take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality.' Jack Fisk served as art director, applying that outside-time brief to every location and prop. It was the first of several collaborations between him and Malick.

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• 3. Invested on Faith

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  In 1970, at age twenty-seven, Malick began writing Badlands during a road trip. He assembled not just a screenplay but what he called 'a kind of sales kit with slides and video tape of actors.' The kit was designed to show investors something that looked 'ready to shoot.' The investors were less interested than he expected. 'To my surprise,' Malick said, 'they didn't pay too much attention to it; they invested on faith.' Malick raised about half the production money himself, paying $25,000 from his own pocket. The remainder of his share came from professionals such as doctors and dentists. Executive producer Edward Pressman raised the other half. Principal photography started in July 1972 in Colorado with a non-union crew. The budget came to $300,000, not counting some deferments to film labs and actors. Trouble came quickly. Several crew members clashed with Malick. An explosion severely injured one worker during the filming of the fire scene. Malick's first cinematographer, Brian Probyn, quit mid-shoot after balking at the director's unorthodox methods. Probyn's replacement, Tak Fujimoto, was himself replaced by Stevan Larner, who finished the film. Pressman later noted that 'the film looks remarkably seamless' despite all that. Robert Estrin handled the editing, credited as the sole editor on the finished cut. What he and Malick assembled from that chaos would face an equally uncertain path to its audience.

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• 4. Mining for Gold

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  Malick cast Sissy Spacek first, while she was working only in her second film. He found her small-town Texas roots and accent exactly right for the part of a naive, impressionable young woman. His process with her was unusual. He asked about her life, she later recalled, 'as if he were mining for gold.' When he learned she had once been a majorette, he wrote a twirling routine into the script. For the role of Kit Carruthers, several up-and-coming actors came in to audition. When the casting director suggested Martin Sheen, Malick was hesitant. He thought Sheen might be too old for the part. Spacek wrote in her autobiography that once Sheen arrived, 'the chemistry was immediate. He was Kit. And with him, I was Holly.' Sheen based his characterization of Kit on the actor James Dean. A quieter chemistry developed off camera. Art director Jack Fisk and Spacek fell in love during the shoot. They were married on the 12th of April, 1974. Malick himself ended up with an uncredited cameo as the man at the rich man's door. The actor originally hired for the role had failed to show up.

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• 5. The Gassenhauer

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  The short composition Gassenhauer, from Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman's Schulwerk, plays repeatedly throughout the film. The piece comes from an educational music collection; in Malick's hands, it returns across scenes of flight and killing. The broader soundtrack is eclectic: Erik Satie, Nat 'King' Cole, Mickey and Sylvia, and James Taylor all appear. In 2003, Bill Paxton singled out a specific piece by Satie, Trois Morceaux en forme de Poire. Paxton described how it plays across a late sequence in the film. The police are tightening around the couple. Holly narrates quietly about faraway places she has never visited. A very long-lens shot shows something moving across the horizon. Paxton wasn't certain what it was, but it looked, he said, 'like a shot of an Arabian caravan moving across the desert.' These moments, Paxton wrote, 'have nothing to do with the story, and yet everything to do with it.' They are, in his words, 'not plot-orientated' but concerned with 'the longing or the dreams of these characters.' He called them 'the kind of moments you never forget.' Those sounds and silences would reach audiences only after an unlikely journey through the studio system.

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• 6. A Slow Burn

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  Warner Bros. acquired Badlands for just under a million dollars, then stumbled on how to present it. The company paired the film for its first preview with Blazing Saddles, the Mel Brooks comedy. The production team had to rebook the film into other theaters afterward. Locations such as Little Rock, Arkansas, were chosen to prove the film could earn money. Critics at the film's own premiere screenings were less troubled. Vincent Canby called it 'a cool, sometimes brilliant, always ferociously American film.' He described Sheen and Spacek as 'splendid as the self-absorbed, cruel, possibly psychotic children of our time.' He also praised Warren Oates as Holly's father among the supporting cast. Canby concluded that 'one may legitimately debate the validity of Malick's vision, but not, I think, his immense talent.' At the 28th British Academy Film Awards, Spacek received a nomination for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles. At the San Sebastián International Film Festival, Sheen won the Best Actor award. In April 1974, Jay Cocks proposed a different angle. He suggested the film should be regarded 'less as a companion piece to Bonnie and Clyde than as an elaboration and reply.' Cocks found 'a frosty irony' in the comedy, and a violence 'executed with a dry, remorseless drive.' Edward Pressman later acknowledged that most initial critical notices had been negative. The reputation grew. The film holds a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 59 critics. The critical consensus describes it as 'a masterful slice of American cinema,' citing its 'visual poetry and measured performances.' On Metacritic, the weighted score is 94 out of 100 from 21 reviews, indicating universal acclaim. Variety called it an 'impressive' debut. David Thomson described the work as 'by common consent, one of the most remarkable first feature films made in America.' Writing for The Chicago Reader, Dave Kehr called it 'a film so rich in ideas it hardly knows where to turn.' Roger Ebert added Badlands to his Great Movies list in 2011. In 1993, the Library of Congress selected it for the United States National Film Registry as being 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.' In 1999, Martin Sheen said Badlands was still the best script he had ever read. 'It was mesmerising,' Sheen wrote. 'It disarmed you. It was a period piece, and yet of all time.' Spacek said the experience with Malick changed how she thought about filmmaking. 'The artist rules,' she said. 'Nothing else matters.' Jack Fisk and Malick continued collaborating through the majority of Malick's subsequent films, among them To the Wonder and Knight of Cups. The creative partnership that shaped those films began during the fractured production in Colorado in 1972.

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