Badlands [Criterion Collection]

Director: Terrence Malick Terrence Malick

Overview

"He wanted to die with me and I dreamed of being lost forever in his arms." A young couple goes on a Midwest crime spree in Terrence Malick's hypnotically assured debut feature, based on the 1950s Starkweather-Fugate murders. Fancying himself a rebel like James Dean, twentysomething Kit (Martin Sheen) takes off with teen baton-twirler Holly (Sissy Spacek) after shooting her father (Warren Oates) when he tries to split the pair up. Once bounty hunters discover their riverside hiding place, Kit and Holly head toward Saskatchewan, leaving dead bodies in their wake. As the law closes in, however, Holly gives herself up -- but Kit doesn't hold it against her, as he basks in his new status as a momentary folk hero. Inaugurating the use of voice-over narration that he would continue in Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick juxtaposes Holly's flat readings of her flowery romance-novel diary prose with the banal and surreal details of their journey. Singularly inarticulate with each other, Kit and Holly are more intrigued by mythic celebrity gestures, as Holly peruses her fan magazines and Kit commemorates key moments before orchestrating a properly dramatic capture for himself (complete with the right hat). The sublime visuals lend a dreamlike beauty to the couple's trip even as their actions are treated casually; Malick neither glamorizes Kit and Holly nor consigns them to the bloody end of their fame-fixated predecessors in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). With the couple's opaque dialogue and Holly's fanzine dream narration, Malick further denies an easy explanation for their crimes. Made for under 500,000 dollars, Badlands debuted at the 1973 New York Film Festival, along with Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, and was released within months of two other outlaw-couple road movies, Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express and Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us. Although Badlands did not make an impression at the box office, its pictorial splendor and cool yet disquieting narrative established Malick as one of the most compelling artists to come out of early-'70s Hollywood.

Product Details

Release Date:	03/19/2013
UPC:	0715515104319
Original Release:	1973
Source:	Criterion Collection
Region Code:	1
Presentation:	[Wide Screen]
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Mono]
Language:	English
Time:	1:34:00
Sales rank:	12,737

Special Features

New, restored 4K digital transfer, approved by director Terrence Malick; Making "Badlands," a new documentary featuring actors Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek and art director Jack Fisk; New interviews with assiciate editor Billy Weber and executive producer Edward Pressman; "Charles Starkweather," a 1993 episode of the television program American Justice, about the real-life story on which the film was loosely based; Trailer; Plus: A booklet featuring an essay by filmmaker Michael Almereyda

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Martin Sheen	Kit Carruthers,Actor
Sissy Spacek	Holly Sargis
Warren Oates	Mr. Sargis
Ramon Bieri	Cato
Alan Vint	Le député
Gary Littlejohn	Sheriff
John Carter	Rich Man
Bryan Montgomery	Boy
Gail Threlkeld	Girl
Charles Fitzpatrick	Clerk
Howard Ragsdale	Boss
John Womack Jr.	Trooper on plane
Dona Baldwin	Maid
Ben Bravo	Gas Station Attendant
Terrence Malick	Salesman
George Aliceson Tipton	Composer
Emilio Estevez	Actor
Carl Orff	Composer
Erik Satie	Composer
Nat 'King' Cole	Composer

Technical Credits

Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick	Director,Screenwriter,Producer
Edward R. Pressman	Executive Producer,Producer
Diane Derfner	Casting
George Fisher	Stunts

Scene Index

Disc #1 -- Badlands
1. Kit [7:18]
2. "Days Of Happiness" [8:02]
3. Holly's Punishment [3:44]
4. Murder [4:18]
5. Big Decision [7:33]
6. A New Life [10:09]
7. Cato [4:52]
8. "Shoot All Witnesses" [6:44]
9. The Rich Man [1:30]
10. "Our Headlong Way" [7:10]
11. The End Nears [8:12]
12. Caught [4:34]
13. Sentenced [11:03]
14. Color Bars [8:34]

Menu

Disc #1 -- Badlands
   Play The Movie
   Chapters
   Making Badlands
   Producer Edward Pressman
   Editor Billy Weber
   "Charles Starkweather"
   Trailer

Editorial Reviews

The auspicious filmmaking debut of Terence Malick, BADLANDS is a haunting and ferociously intelligent work that probes the collective American psyche. Set in a small town in South Dakota in the late 1950s, the story begins when a garbage collector and James Dean lookalike, Kit (Martin Sheen), meets Holly (Sissy Spacek), a baton-twirling high schooler who lives alone with her father. In a monotone voice-over as flat as the plains that surround them, Holly recounts her life on the run with the murderous Kit. Her language, laced with the purple clichés of pulp romance writers, eerily highlights the couple's essential moral emptiness. Based on the true-life killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, BADLANDS' stunning imagery and the exquisitely understated performances from Sheen and Spacek help create a disturbing fable about that most lethal of American brews: the potent combination of isolation, violence, and the cult of celebrity.

Barnes & Noble - Monica McIntyre

What could have been just another story about delinquents on the run was turned into something extraordinary by first-time director Terrence Malick. A uniquely lyrical story of violence and teenage mythos in the 1950s, Badlands is probably the most low-key film ever made about a mass murderer. Twenty-four-year-old Kit Carruthers (played to perfection by Martin Sheen) has so deeply immersed himself in the studied, affectless cool of James Dean that he appears incapable of showing emotions, while his 15-year-old girlfriend, Holly (Sissy Spacek, also excellent), is at once too baffled by Kit to know how to react and too bored and starved for attention to turn him away when he drags her along for a multi-state killing spree; their crimes seem to stem less from anger than from ennui gone wrong. Much as Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns featured amoral men in a landscape at once beautiful and desolate, Malick places his murderous couple in an American landscape both stunning and strangely barren; Kit's violence seems less an act of focused rage than a pitiful attempt to make something new of his otherwise plain surroundings, much as Holly's flowery narration tries to derive an exciting story from their arid, sordid lives. (Malick's camera crew, led by Tak Fujimoto, Steven Larner, and Brian Probyn, do brilliant work on a limited budget.) Presenting his killers without judgment (but without approval, either), Malick wrought a strange and unsettling beauty for this first chapter in his remarkable (if not prolific) film career.

All Movie Guide - Mark Deming