Badlands

One of the most striking cinematic debuts of all time, Terrence Malick’s Badlands – a powerful and disturbing tale of young lovers on the run - won instant widespread acclaim on its original release. Critics were dazzled by the sheer originality of its 29-year-old director, the brilliant cinematography of Taki Fujimoto, the haunting soundtrack featuring music by Carl Orff, Erik Satie and Nat King Cole, and the superb performances of its two young leads.

Malick’s script is loosely based on the real-life story of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather who, in 1958, murdered the family of his underage girlfriend, Caril Fugate, before embarking on a killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming. Starkweather was executed in 1959, while his girlfriend was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Badlands, set in a sleepy South Dakota town in the late 1950s, stars Martin Sheen as Kit, a 25-year-old garbage collector, and Sissy Spacek as Holly, a bored high-school student ten years his junior. Struck by Kit’s resemblance to James Dean, Holly not only defies her father (Warren Oates) by starting a relationship with him, but stands by as Kit subsequently shoots her father dead and sets fire to the family home. Taking to the road, the couple first seek refuge in nature, building themselves an idyllic hideaway in a cottonwood grove. However, they are soon disturbed by bounty hunters – rapidly disposed of by Kit – and are forced to go on the run again, killing anyone who happens to get in their way. With the vague idea of heading north - via a rich man’s house where Terrence Malick makes a brief appearance as a visitor to the house - the couple make their way through the barren landscape, trying to eke out an existence with only each other for company and the law closing in as their notoriety as serial killers spreads across the land.

Both Spacek (then 23) and Sheen (33) play younger than their real ages with complete credibility: Spacek as the ethereal, detached teen whose world view is shaped by the Hollywood fan magazines she so avidly consumes (her voice-over narration is couched in their style), and Sheen as the eerily calm and composed young killer who models himself on James Dean and is absurdly delighted when the officer who finally arrests him comments on his likeness to his idol.

Given Kit’s conscious cultivation of his own romantic misfit legend, it is particularly appropriate that Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel Without A Cause, was chairman of the jury that awarded Badlands the top prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival of 1974. 35 years on, in an age of mass yearning for fame at any price, Malick’s laconic masterpiece – with its refusal to romanticise or glamorise the homicidal lovers – is more resonant than ever.