Take One (Sep-Oct 1972)

never seen her before, | think I’m going to be a sucker for Bonnie Bedelia movies from now on. Finally, a month after John Ford’s death, I’m a sucker for any film where an old man stands over the grave of his friend and sings “We Shall Gather By the River’. Joe Medjuck BADLANDS A Pressman-Williams Presentation of a Jill Jakes Production. Produced, written and directed by Terrence Malick. Photography: Brian Probyn, Tak Fujimoto, Stevan Larner. Editor: Robert Estrin. Associate Editor: William Weber. Art Director: Jack Fisk. Music: Carl Orff, Eric Satie, James Taylor, Nat “King” Cole, Mickey & Sylvia, and original music by George Tipton. Cast: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates, Ramon Bieri, Alan Vint, Gary Littlejohn. 95 minutes. During the last six or seven years, a minor genre of American film has grown up around the phenomenon of mass murder: Manson and The _ Boston Strangler have been apotheosized in film and the Clutter murders and the Texas Tower have provided — more or less — the materials for Capote-Brooks’ In Cold Blood and Platt-Bogdanovich’s Targets. Both are interesting and useful films, but both are now surpassed by Terrence Malick’s ominous first feature, Badlands. Badlands is very loosely based on the saga of Charlie Starkweather and Carol Ann Fugate who, some years ago, went on a rather publicity-ridden rampage through the upper mid-west. What the film takes from reality is, mainly, the characters: 25-year-old garbageman Kit Carruthers and his 14-year-old girlfriend Holly Sargis; and the locale: the wideopen spaces of the upper mid-west. Kit and Holly begin a rather chaste romance in South Dakota. (The film is set in 195960.) When her father (Warren Oates) finds out about it, he teaches Holly a lesson by shooting her pet dog. But the romance of Kit and Holly was made in heaven and must transcend these minor difficulties and Kit is “forced” to shoot Holly’s father. Their odyssey then begins: several weeks in an ethereal tree-house in a grove of cottonwoods in the wilderness and a trek cross-country in a Cadillac towards what they hope will be freedom in Canada. Eventually, Holly loses heart for the adventure and — bereft of his heart’s true love — Kit also decides it is now time to stage his surrender. This “love story” is, of course, punctuated with a dozen or so murders and attempted murders but Malick’s genius is to film these murders with the same witless dispassion with which Holly and Kit regard them. Murder is no more real for them than it is in the media. Holly is a voracious reader of teen romance and fan club magazines and she has no more conception of what it means to kill another human being than she has of what it is to love one. Her entire personal James Monaco is a lecturer in Film and Drama at New York's New School for Social Research and a frequent Take One contributor. 32 Malick grew up in Texas and Oklahoma, graduated from Harvard, went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, worked for Newsweek, Life and The New Yorker, and lectured for a year in Philosophy at M.I.T. He “studied at the American Film Institute in Beverly Hills’ and made a short funded by the A.F.I. He is 29. The film is produced by Pressman-Williams who are Edward Pressman and Paul Williams who formed their company when they were both 23. This is the second Pressman-Williams film not to be directed by Paul Williams (the first is Brian De Palma’s Sisters). Pressman-Williams thus immediately joins BBS Films as an important independent center for film production. Badlands was made for $335,000 cash plus “plenty of deferments.” This in itself makes the film important. If Pressman-Williams and other independents just as intelligent can a) make films of professional quality for that amount of money, and b) get them widely distributed through the | majors, then the American film industry is going to be wonderfully healthy in the remaining seventies. ity is molded in the simplistic forms of the fiction which has created her. Her brilliantly wooden voice-over narration of the film in the style of the insidiously romantic stories she feeds on gives the film a strong distantiation that, in turn, lends the film a brassy flavor that makes it unique. We haven't heard such rich narrative poetry since the last Carol Eastman script. Malick creates an electric current between the positive pole of the voice-over narration and the negative pole of the images on the screen. The horror of the film is that Holly explains, understands so well what is going on; she has made their adventure rational, comprehensible in terms of the romance of pre-teen fiction. Their murders are directly connected, as a phenomenon, to training bras, barbie-dolls, and bubble-gum rock ‘n’ roll. Like those elements of contemporary media culture, Holly and Kit's murders are entirely non-orgasmic, thoroughly perverse and anti-sexual. This is Malick’s special insight. Sam Peckinpah and Don Seigel may be turned on by the sexual nature of killing; Malick knows that its mechanical, cold, and diffident aspect is more frightening and more important to an understanding of the U.S. death force. When both Holly and Kit get tired of playing their media game they make existential decisions to end it. They are in no immediate peril of getting caught. Holly simply takes an opportunity to get off the merry-go-round and Kit decides it is time to stage his capture. On the way back to town with the sheriffs who have “caught” him, Kit and the lawmen com pare notes on their performances in the chase. Before the sheriff caught up with him, Kit took the time to pile up a small monument of stones to mark the historic site where he had decided to end the story. Later, at the airport where Kit is waiting to be extradited back to South Dakota, he trades jokes with the police and National Guard contingent brought out to guard this dangerous criminal. They not only understand him, they like him. He does look like James Dean, and it has been quite exciting to read about him in the newspapers these past few weeks. Just as he’s about to leave, he turns to Holly: “Course it’s too bad about your Dad,” he explains, “We're going to have to sit down and talk about that sometime.” Holly is no cold-blooded monster, no Freudian demon. She was hurt a bit by the death of her father, but Malick leaves no doubt that Kit and Holly, when they do get to “talk about that” will come to some genial agreement in less than half an hour. That is the special complex intelligence of Terrence Malick’s Badlands. James Monaco THE THREE MUSKETEERS A Twentieth Century-Fox release of an Alexander, Michael and llya Salkind Production for Film Trust S.A. A Richard Lester Film. Director: Richard Lester. Screenplay: George MacDonald Fraser (based on the novel The Three Musketeers — The Queen's Diamonds, by Alexandre Dumas). Music: Michel Legrand. Executive in charge of production: Pierre Spengler. Cast: Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch, Richard Chamberlain, Michael York, Frank Finlay, Christopher Lee, Geraldine Chaplin, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Spike Milligan, Roy Kinnear, Sybil Danning, Gitty Djamal, Simon Ward, Faye Dunaway, Chariton Heston. Technicolor. Panavision. The complaint in Paris, where | saw this film, is that Lester has betrayed Dumas. One critic objected that Lester’s musketeers ignore the Queensberry rules, interspersing sword thrusts with kicks to the groin. Actually, that’s probably the most reliable detail in the whole proceedings. The film, as you'd expect, is a send up. D’Artagnan (Michael York) is a wide-eyed country bumpkin, more Keystone than Fairbanks, and all the principal characters are to some extent ridiculed, except for Richelieu, one of those feline, intelligent scoundrels who in a happier age would have been portrayed by Basil Rathbone. In these hard times we have to make do with Chuck Heston, but he really isn’t bad. From a superficial viewpoint, Lester’s irreverence vis-a-vis Dumas does him credit. Any film that took seriously the aristocratic ethos of 17th-century France would be by definition reactionary. Lester isn’t reactionary, merely nihilistic. The film doesn’t ignore the serfdom that enabled noblemen to go around happily slitting each others’ throats, but Lester's contempt spills over on to everybody, commoners included. They’re just a bunch of poor