Badlands

Badlands is a 1973 film written and directed by Terrence Malick, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Warren Oates and Ramon Bieri are also featured. Malick has a small speaking part although he does not receive an acting credit. The story, though fictional, is loosely based on the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, in 1957. Badlands is narrated from the perspective of Holly (Spacek), a teenage... more

Badlands is a 1973 film written and directed by Terrence Malick, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Warren Oates and Ramon Bieri are also featured. Malick has a small speaking part although he does not receive an acting credit. The story, though fictional, is loosely based on the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, in 1957. Badlands is narrated from the perspective of Holly (Spacek), a teenaged girl living in a dead-end South Dakota town. One day she meets Kit (Sheen), a rebellious young greaser who sweeps her off her feet and takes her as his accomplice on a cross-country killing spree. Holly's narration, describing her adventures with Kit with romantic clichés, is juxtaposed with the grim reality of Kit's sociopathic appetite for grisly violence. This use of voice-over to create a dialectic between sound and image has become a dominant feature of Malick's work. Malick began work on Badlands after his second year as a student at... less