Badlands: No 4 best crime film of all time
Terrence Malick, 1973
Ryan Gilbey
Sunday 17 October 2010 11.52 BST
Terrence Malick based his peerlessly poetic debut on the real-life story of Charles Starkweather, a teenage James Dean wannabe who fled across the midwest on a killing spree, his 14-year-old girlfriend in tow. But the film couldn't be further from a pulpy true-crime tale, or a hip New Wave homage like Bonnie and Clyde. It's a true original: eloquent about the intersection of crime, romanticism and myth-making in America, and highly innovative in its use of colour, editing and voice-over. Martin Sheen, who was cast as the Starkweather surrogate, Kit, believed Badlands was the best script he had ever read. "Still is," he says. "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." Sissy Spacek played Holly, the baton-twirling schoolgirl who elopes with Kit after he kills her father (Warren Oates).
The film's dislocated emotional effect arises almost entirely from Holly, whose banal narration goes starkly against the grain. Traditionally, a voice-over fills in the blanks, but Badlands is defined by the contradiction between what we see and what we hear. Holly's blank reaction when Kit guns down her father makes the slaying more shocking than any amount of hysterical identification. "She isn't indifferent about her father's death," Malick pointed out. "She might have cried buckets of tears, but she wouldn't think of telling you about it. It would not be proper. You should always feel there are large parts of her experience she's not including because she has a strong, if misplaced, sense of propriety." This suggestion that we may not be getting the full story is crucial to appreciating Malick, who is more likely, at a moment of drama, to turn his camera on a quivering blade of grass. In fact, Malick's career was to be the biggest ellipsis of all, with only four more features to date (Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World and the forthcoming Tree of Life) completed after Badlands. Not that this trifling fact can undermine, in any way, his place as the visionary of American film-making.
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