370 - Badlands, United States, 1973. Dir. Terrence Malick.

Saturday, January 5, 2018

370 - Badlands, United States, 1973.  Dir. Terrence Malick.

Love is on the run.

Out on the prairie.  In the Badlands.  Across Montana.  Being chased by the police, the sheriff, and the National Guard.

Holly Sargis is one-half of love.

She comes from Texas, but started running in Fort Dupree, South Dakota.  When she started seeing a boy without telling her father.  A single parent.  A sign painter.

Kit Carruthers is the other half.

He is from nowhere.

Now they are headed for Saskatchewan.  If they can just get across that border.  If they get separated they will meet at the Grand Coulee Dam, twelve noon (High Noon), New Year's Day, 1964.

Kit wants to be somebody.  To be important.  To be remembered.  To leave some kind of mark on the world.  He takes rocks and leaves rock piles like an Old Testament patriarch.  This rock symbolizes where we first made love.  (Let me get a smaller one.)  This rock pile is the place where I was captured.

He shares his name with an American legend.  The other Kit was a frontiersman.  A fur trapper.  A mountain man.  This Kit is a garbage collector.  Fired.  With no vocational training.  And no job skills.  Maybe he can work cattle over at the pens.  Use a captive bolt pistol to knock them in the head.

But he can talk.

"I got some stuff to say.  I guess I'm lucky that way."

And he can shoot.  A Hi-Standard Sentinel Revolver.  A Savage 99R Rifle.  .300 caliber.

Charles Starkweather also shared a name.  With Jim Stark.  James Dean's character in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

And in 1958 he shocked the nation when he at 19 went on a shooting spree with his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate

What also startled the nation was how charming he could be.

Kit Carruthers tries to be charming too.  And he charms his way into Holly's heart.  We know because she tells us.  It is she who tells the story.

This 15-year-old girl.

"He was handsomer than anybody I'd ever met.  He looked just like James Dean."

"Little by little we fell in love."

"As I'd never been popular in school and didn't have a lot of personality, I was surprised that he took such a liking to me."

"But I sensed that my destiny now lay with Kit, for better or for worse.  And that it was better to spend a week with one who loved me for what I was than years of loneliness."

"I gotta stick by Kit.  He feels trapped."

"He dreaded the idea of being shot down alone, he said, without a girl to scream out his name."

That says it all.

Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) had a girl scream out his name in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960).  Will Kit be so lucky?

Terrence Malick tells stories in sweeping visual landscapes.  Locations mean everything to this film.  From the garbage on the streets of Fort Dupree to the Sargis home to the billboard on the side of the road to Cato's isolate farm to the treehouse in the woods to that amazing rich man's mansion, the open prairie, the culvert below the train tracks, the helicopter, the gas station, the long stretches of highway, the setting sun.  From South Dakota to North Dakota to Montana on to Canada.

All filmed in Colorado.  La Junta.  Las Animas.  Trinidad.  Rocky Ford.  Pueblo.  The Bloom mansion.  The Rosemont museum.  Breathtaking.

Jack Fisk's art direction matters here.  Rosanna Norton's wardrobe costume design matters.  The cinematography matters.  Three cinematographers are listed.  Tak Fujimoto.  Steven Larner.  Brian Probyn.  Who did what?  The results are spectacular.

Badlands transcends its own story.  It works on a visual level.  A visceral level.  It is poetic.

And it speaks to the heart of what it means to be human.  Even if the individual choices and actions do not make sense to you.

The longing to be important.

The longing to be remembered.

The longing to be loved.

And not to be alone.


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Sissy Spacek auditioned for all the plays in high school.  She did not get picked for any of them.  Not even for a small role.

She says, "I was a theater failure."

Then she went to the Lee Strasburg Institute.  She did not advance into Scene Study class.

Then she was told, "If you don't lose that accent, you will never make it."  They were referring to her Texas roots.

Would you say that she has done OK?

Meanwhile, Martin Sheen had been acting professionally for a dozen years.  Mostly in co-star and guest-star roles on television, but also in a few movies.  When he first read this script he thought he was too old.  Starkweather had been 19 and Sheen was 31.  But Terrence Malick said, No.  I'm making the character older.  I want you.  Sheen was driving into work down the Pacific Coast Highway, on his way to film an episode of Mannix when he realized that he had just been offered the role of his life.  He pulled the car off the road, parked it, and wept.

"Someone had finally seen something in me that I knew was there but I couldn't get anyone else to see."