“The blueprint for Malick’s entire output, marked by near-whispered narration and communion with the natural world. But it also exudes a timeless, mythical and tragic quality which is all the more remarkable for the languorous ease with which its story unfolds. Infused with an uncharacterisable romanticism, and employing one of the most entrancing uses of soundtrack music – from the honey voice of Nat King Cole to the jaunty yet haunting xylophone of George Aliceson Tipton – since Pasolini’s ‘Gospel According to St Matthew’, it’s a challengingly non-judgmental work which lulls the viewer into a sublime state of false security, the better to deliver a stunning but gentle essay on freedom and necessity, life and death.” “This first, magnificent, outpouring of the sporadic genius of cinema’s equivalent to JD Salinger, Terrence Malick, still seems terrifically modern…A film of ‘visionary realism,’ Badlands is as psychologically precise as it is splendidly visually observant. “Cool, sometimes brilliant, always ferociously American… Badlands is a most important and exciting film.” “Brilliantly composed with a loose, directionless swing that looks easy (but isn’t), and a superbly delicate, literate voiceover from Spacek that conveys the bizarre babes-in-the-wood quality of their life together on the run…An unmissable, transcendentally beautiful classic.” “One of the most impressive directorial debuts ever.” Days of Heaven put Malick’s intuitions into cogent form, but this is where his art begins.” Transcendent themes of love and death are fused with a pop-culture sensibility and played out against a midwestern background, which is breathtaking both in its sweep and in its banality. “So rich in ideas in hardly knows where to turn. It was legitimate for the film to avoid explanation because the action was so dense and eloquent, the myth so solid and matter-of-fact.” Above all, Badlands balanced the externals of landscape and violence with their imaginative resonance. The story moves with an energetic fatalism. “THE MOST ASSURED FIRST FILM BY AN AMERICAN SINCE CITIZEN KANE. He waited another five years until his next film, Days of Heaven, then took a two-decade break before his third, The Thin Red Line. But that’s only the first level of Malick’s unique work, the continuing mayhem accompanied by surrealistically opaque dialogue distanced by dazzling color photography of ethereal dreamlike landscapes (at one point, in the middle of nowhere, they dance to the car radio in headlight beams and a semi-classical score in counterpoint) all narrated in the past tense in Spacek’s romance magazine style: “He wanted to die with me and I dreamed of being lost forever in his arms.” Malick cameos as the architect, because “we didn’t have enough money to fly someone in” – but seeing himself onscreen proved so traumatic that he’s been camera-shy ever since. Malick’s debut is a classic outlaw-couple-on-the-run story, based on the Starkweather/Fugate case, with Sheen taking teenage baton twirler Sissy Spacek –after blasting her father Warren Oates– on a killing spree across the prairies towards Saskatchewan – where Sheen plans to become a Mountie. (1973) “I can’t allow that,” states soft-spoken James Dean-influenced garbage man Martin Sheen, just prior to cold-blooded murder.
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