Badlands (Pressman-Williams Productions, Jill Jakes Productions, Warner Bros., 1972)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Turner Classic Movies were airing a couple of films I was interested in, including one neither my husband Charles nor I had ever seen before: Terrence Malick’s first film, Badlands (the copyright date is 1972, though imdb.com listed it as from 1973). Badlands was based on a notorious story of two spree killers, Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, who hooked up in Nebraska in late 1957 and went on a killing spree that started with him shooting her mother and stepfather and clubbing to death her two-year-old baby half-sister. They terrorized the southern Midwest for two months before the police finally arrested them in Wyoming. At the time they got together the real Charles Starkweather was 18 and Caril Fugate was just 13. From the bare facts writer-director-producer Terrence Malick concocted an oddly pastoral story about Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) and his girlfriend Holly (Sissy Spacek), whom he meets while making his runs as a garbageman (also a job the real Charles Starkweather held) in South Dakota. Holly was born in Texas but her father (Warren Oates) moved them to South Dakota after Holly’s mother died and made a living as a sign painter – and Malick gets the most he can out of the irony between the vivid quality of the scenes he’s painting for his signs and the drab existence he and his daughter are actually leading. Dad forbids the 25-year-old Kit from seeing his 15-year-old daughter, and Kit responds by killing him and then setting fire to his house.

In a chilling scene he makes a record at one of those record-your-own-voice booths that survived in my childhood at the Playland Amusement Park in San Francisco, announcing that he and Holly have decided to kill themselves because the world is so terrible and they can’t see any future for themselves in it. Not surprisingly, he has no intention of killing either himself or Holly; he leaves the record on repeat in hopes that it will survive the fire and lead the police and prosecutors to assume he and Holly are dead and therefore beyond the reach of the law. Then Kit and Holly get into Kit’s car – a low-riding black sedan of uncertain make which practically becomes a character itself – and for the next few weeks they set up camp in the wilderness, rigging up an elaborate set of traps to fight back in case either police or private bounty hunters come along and try to take them in. Kit shoots two bounty hunters in the back, explaining to Holly that the cops at least have a job to do while the bounty hunters are just doing it for the money. (So are the cops, when you stop to think about it.) Kit and Holly go on the ron and hole up in the home of a rich man who lives alone except for a live-in maid who’s deaf and can’t speak, and – unlike the real Charles Starkweather, who occupied the home of a rich man and ultimately killed both him and his maid – the fictional Kit and Holly let him live and just steal his Cadillac car. Earlier Kit has killed a gas-station attendant whom he feared was going to turn him in – the real Charles Starkweather got into an argument with a service-station attendant and shot him even before killing Fugate’s mother and stepfather, but one can tell why Malick wanted to make Holly’s dad Kit’s first victim. (At the same time I give him pouts for not having Holly’s dad molest her, which would have made him seem much too sympathetic.)

Kit and Holly are finally arrested by the police, and Kit is taken into custody and ultimately executed, while Holly is spared the death penalty but is sentenced to life in prison. (The real Caril Fugate served 17 years and was finally released on parole in 1976.) Finally catching up to this film after hearing about it for 50 years, what struck me most about it was the sheer contrast between the ugliness of Kit’s and Holly’s actions and the pastoral beauty of the countryside in which they take place. It’s true that a lot of movies have made that point, deliberately setting horrific scenes in stunningly beautiful locations, but few had done this as relentlessly as Badlands. Another is the intriguing use if oioykar usic of the time (1957-58), including two songs in particular, Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” and Nat “King” Cole’s “A Blossom Fell” (to which Kit ahd Holly dance in a nighttime scene, ironic since the lyrics are about jealousy and loss: “The dream has ended, for true love died/The night a blossom fell and touched two lips that lied”).

One person who was obviously impressed by Badlands was Bruce Springsteen, who began his 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town with a song called “Badlands” (as he had begun his immediately previous album, Born to Run, with “Thunder Road,” another song named after a classic film: a 1958 independent production starring Robert Mitchum as a moonshiner) and four years later started his solo album Nebraska with a song of that title about the real Charles Starkweather. One noteworthy aspect of Badlands is the extent to which Martin Sheen’s character reminds one of James Dean; not only does Malick shoot Sheen in Dean’s classic poses, but he works into the dialogue at both the beginning and the end references to how much the character resembles Dean. At the beginning the comparison is made by Sissy Spacek as Holly, and at the end it’s done by one of the cops who arrest him. (There’s also a moment of symbolic castration as one of the cops takes off Kit’s cowboy hat and throws it out the car window.) And I was also struck by the weird way Sissy Spacek’s role anticipates her performance as country-music star Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter eight years later; though Doolittle Lynn wasn’t a killer, he was a man of unsavory reputation who came along and pulled Loretta away from her family and their grinding poverty into a life filled with the promise of adventure. Spacek’s character here is even drawn as musical; though we don’t actually get to hear her, we see her with both a piano and a clarinet, and dad has decided to buy her music lessons in hopes she’ll be so busy practicing she won’t have time to see Kit.

TCM showed Badlands under rather odd auspices: they’re doing a series of features called “TCM Looks at America” in which regular host Ben Mankiewicz (whom I’ve referred to elsewhere as “a nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees”) is joined by immigrants who recall particular American films they saw in their home countries and which made an impression on them that shaped their expectatioins of what they would find when they actually got here. Mankiewicz’s co-host for Badlands was Abdi Iflim from Somalia, who recalled that during his childhood he would watch so many American films in group showings at VCR-equipped private homes that he would memorize the dialogue he’d learned by ear. He talked so much like an American movie character he got the nickname “Abdi American.” Abdi’s main recollection of Badlands was how much the locations (the film was set in South Dakota but actually shot in Colorado) reminded him of Somalia, particularly the patina of dust over everything that gives the film an overall desert coloration. In the past I’ve been harsh on films that have an overall brown tonality – I’ve even joked that if you’re going to use so little of the visible spectrum anyway, why not just shoot it in black-and-white? – but for Badlands the overall brown tonality actually works because it becomes a symbol of how trapped the characters are in that environment and how they ache for something to happen to them, even if that means committing senseless murders.