Badlands at 50: Why it’s still a killer film

Terrence Malick’s debut was shot half a century ago, but, says Geoffrey Macnab, it remains such a disarming film because it’s light-spirited and playful when you least expect it

Sissy Spacek in ‘Badlands’ (Warner Bros/Kobal/Shutterstock)

It’s the dying fish that sticks in the mind. You don’t see one in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or any of the other US movies about murderous young lovers on the lam. Director Terrence Malick’s astounding debut feature Badlands (1973), which started production just over 50 years ago, has a simplicity that is completely out of kilter with its time. While his contemporaries Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma were making gritty, violent urban movies exposing the racial, sexual, and political tensions in an America coming to terms with the disasters of Watergate and the Vietnam War, Malick was recreating the midwest of the late 1950s in loving fashion. Nostalgia reigned.

It’s not that Badlands skimps on the violence. This is a story about a serial killer who leaves corpses wherever he goes. In the film, the South Dakota garbage collector and James Dean lookalike Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) shoots almost everybody who crosses his path. However, Malick’s style is playful and naive. At times, it’s as if he is making a kids’ movie. That’s where the fish comes in. The first killing shown in the movie is committed by Kit’s doe-eyed teenage girlfriend Holly (Sissy Spacek). When her pet fish gets sick, she throws it out in the back garden. Malick includes a shot of the abandoned creature writhing away in the undergrowth, its gills flapping forlornly. He holds that shot for longer than he does any images of the bounty hunters, farmers, or passers-by who die at Kit’s hands.

The abandoned fish out of water is just one of the many oddball, surrealistic touches that run through the film. A little later, in an equally bizarre scene, when Holly’s father (Warren Oates) discovers she has been running around behind his back, he punishes her for deceiving him by shooting her dog. He then puts it in a bag and drops it in the river.