Badlands (1973)
Directed by Terrence Malick
An impressionable teenage girl from a dead-end town and her older greaser boyfriend embark on a killing spree in the South Dakota badlands.
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6 films that influenced Badlands
What critics say influenced Badlands
Not unlike Max Ophüls' Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) the grounding of this storytelling function within the female character has significant, explicitly critical, effects.
Essentially, Badlands, like They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray,1949), Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949), is a film preoccupied with the fate of its doomed couple.
Essentially, Badlands, like They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray,1949), Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949), is a film preoccupied with the fate of its doomed couple.
The resulting film, despite falling squarely into the general category of the romantic-young-killers-on-the-run genre that exploded in the wake of Arthur Penn’s counterculture hit Bonnie and Clyde (1967), is decidedly unconventional: an broad exercise in demythologizing the heady romance of criminality.
Superficially, this film fits securely into the chain of glamorous period killer/lovers that cropped up in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967; but Badlands is hardly an ordinary movie.
“Badlands” bears some thematic similarity to “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Sugarland Express,” and “Jeremiah Johnson,” though its narrative approach and stylistic strategy are vastly different.
A somewhat similar film was released six years earlier, and is also a revolutionary cultural landmark: Bonnie and Clyde.
This detail is important as it breaches Badlands’ inevitable resemblance to Bonnie and Clyde, a revolutionary film it followed by six years (its director Arthur Penn is thanked in the final credits).
The career of Terrence Malick did not begin in cinema, but in philosophy; a Harvard philosophy student, he had published a translation of Heidegger under the title The Essence of Reasons by age 26, was teaching philosophy at MIT not terribly long after that, was an essayist, a graduate of the American Film Institute, a personal acquaintance of Jack Nicholson (whose directorial debut, Drive, He Said , boasted an uncredited rewrite by Malick).
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She reads gravelly from Hollywood gossip digests and is told to enjoy the scenery, a freckle-dotted blank sheet of paper crouching by her murdered father (Warren Oates) in an image out of Bu�uel�s The Young One, "no shame or fear, just kind of blah."
Malick's first feature film, written after a brief career in academia and a stint at the American Film Institute, is frequently touted as part and parcel of the 1970s New American Cinema (on the surface, it contains the post-western mythos of road movies and on-the-run-romance flicks like Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde), but it's also distinct from those films insofar as it presents a new form of storytelling that's more interesting than its subjects.
The theme of it could be the closed-in cell defined by freedom unfettered--something explored in a subsequent cross-country jaunt, 1973's Badlands--as George says, "Talkin' about [being free] and bein' it are two different things.