Camden Cinema: Badlands | Terence Malick

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 28 August 2008

Badlands is back on the big screen at the BFI

Cheerleader lands herself a bad boy

BADLANDS
Directed by Terence Malick
Certificate 18

THIS all-American murder movie has lost none of its appeal in the 35 years since it was first screened, and hats off to the British Film Institute for ensuring it can be watched on a big screen again.
Terrence Malick has produced a hypnotic crime thriller which smacks of the hard-boiled nature of James M Cain’s superb novellas or Truman Capote’s leading characters in the book In Cold Blood. Like Capote’s tale of murderers Dick and Perry, it is based on a real crimewave in the mid-1950s. Malick was inspired by the tale of Charles Strakweather and his beau Carol Ann Fugate, who earned notoriety by embarking on a seemingly indiscriminate murder spree which shocked America in 1957.
Martin Sheen plays Kit, the rootless garbage collector who hits the road with girlfriend Holly, Sissy Spacek’s fallen-from-grace cheerleader.
The pair’s actions are taken straight from the pages of the crime novels they fantasise they are part of: Holly defies her father by taking up with James Dean look-like Kit. The pair kill him when he tells Holly not to see her boyfriend again.
Once the first crime is committed, the pair hit the road to embark on a nasty killing spree, dictated by where the roads through dusty plains will take them.
Their performances are superb, as is the cinematography: the dramatic feel of Dakota and Montana, where Kit and Holly cause havoc.

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