Badlands.

Review #2496: Badlands.

Cast: 

Martin Sheen (Kit), Sissy Spacek (Holly), Warren Oates (Father), Ramon Bieri (Cato), Alan Vint (Deputy Tom), Gary Littlejohn (Sheriff), John Carter (Rich Man), Bryan Montgomery (Boy), Gail Threlkeld (Girl), and Charley Fitzpatrick (Clerk) Written, Produced, and Directed by Terrence Malick.

Review: 

"I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality. Children's books are full of violence. Long John Silver slits the throats of the faithful crew. Kit and Holly even think of themselves as living in a fairy tale. Holly says, "Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, but this never happened." But she enough believes there is such a place that she must confess to you she never got there." - Terrence Malick

I suppose there's no better way to start with a director as curious as Terence Malick than to just go with their debut. Born in Illinois but raised in the South, Malick studied at Harvard for philosophy and graduated with a bachelor's degree before electing to study further at Oxford University's Magdalen College. However, he left without a degree due to a disagreement over his thesis, which soon saw him travel back to the States to teach philosophy at MIT and do freelance journalism. However, he apparently felt that he wasn't a good teacher when it came to "the sort of edge one should have on the students", so he decided to focus on studying at AFI because of his liking of movies "in a kind of naive way". He made his first short film with Lanton Mills in 1969. Malick's agent got him freelance work revising scripts, which saw him do uncredited drafts for Dirty Harry (1971) and Pocket Money (1972). Malick raised half of the money by approaching people outside of the film industry (alongside using $25,000 of his own savings) while the other half was raised by Edward R. Pressman. Malick described in an interview prior to the release of the film that books such as The Hardy Boys and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, had influence on the script (at least one that he realized influenced him after doing the script). The movie was more a critical darling than an audience hit at the time, but so it goes. Malick continued his career with Days of Heaven (1978) before curiosity reigned over exactly what he was doing before his next film with The Thin Red Line years later in 1998; at any rate, he has directed nine features and one experimental documentary in over five decades as a filmmaker. 

The real events were curious in themselves: Starkweather murdered eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958 at the age of 19 that saw him accompanied by his 14-year-old girlfriend in Caril Ann Fugate (with Badlands, Sheen was 32 and Spacek was 22). Fugate claimed she was a hostage, not knowing until later that her mother, stepfather and sister had already been killed by Starkweather. Sentenced to life, she served 18 years in prison* while Starkweather (once quoted as saying dead people were all on the same level) got the electric chair. Those events have inspired a few other movies such as The Sadist (1963) and Natural Born Killers (1994)*. With Badlands, you get a pretty curious film because it isn't so much just a violent film as it is one that has a strange nature to looking out of time within what actually is seen and heard, mainly because it is more Spacek's film than anything. How else would one understand the type to string along with Sheen unless you hear the underlying journey told by Spacek? There is a haunting nature to the way she navigates the film in terms of passivity that isn't merely just naivety but instead is something that seems removed from, well, you or me. With Sheen, it's much easier to look at him and understand how he could corral certain things to go his way with his magnetism of nonchalance (incidentally, he believed it was the best script he had ever read). They are two empty souls that think the gun as a magic wand (okay that came from Malick) that traverse through the landscape with the same kind of weary nature that we can only hope we don't see in ourselves. They end up as doomed figures hurtling through oblivion that can only be understood by actually viewing the film rather than just seeing images of it and its landscapes. The drama isn't in the chase or in the conflict between these people, nope, instead it is a movie of people who are just in their own element of actions and impulses, which for some might be spookier than a straight-crime movie. But so it goes. As a whole, Badlands is a curious film to see unfold in all of its interesting elements that come from what you see and hear in a spree of morbid curiosity. 

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

*Fugate is still alive, as evidenced by a not-too-distant documentary about her: ‘It’s about more than just a crime’: what if a teen killer was actually a victim? | Documentary | The Guardian

*And even a Springsteen song.

Sorcerer.

Review #2085: Sorcerer.

Cast: 

Roy Scheider (Jackie Scanlon / Juan Dominguez), Bruno Cremer (Victor Manzon / Serrano), Francisco Rabal (Nilo), Amidou (Kassem / Martinez), Ramon Bieri (Corlette), Karl John (Marquez), Peter Capell (Lartigue), Anne-Marie Deschodt (Blanche), and Friedrich von Ledebur (Carlos) Produced and Directed by William Friedkin (#037 - The Exorcist, #1438 - The French Connection, #1477 - To Live and Die in L.A.)

Review: 

"It occurred to me at that time, this was in the middle ’70s, when America had just come through a national nervous breakdown, after the assassinations, the Vietnam war, and it seemed to me—I guess it’s always ever thus—that the world was full of strangers who hated one another, but if they didn’t cooperate, if they didn’t work together in some way, they would blow up. And this film seemed to me to be a metaphor for that idea, which I thought was a valid theme then, and now. I think it’s possibly worse now, with so many countries have weapons of mass destruction. And so, it was the theme that attracted me."

In 1950, French writer Georges Arnaud wrote Le Salaire de la peur. Three years later, it was adapted into The Wages of Fear by director Henri-Georges Clouzot, a multi-language production that starred Yves Montand (this is reflected with Sorcerer, which features subtitles for its non-English vignettes that start the film). After the release of The Exorcist in 1973, William Friedkin was thinking about what he should do next, and he came along with doing a new version of the Arnaud novel (i.e. not a remake), but he approached Clouzot by saying that he would "only use the basic premise and your theme" (which he felt was really a theme of brotherhood) while noting that he tried to get the older film re-released in theaters but no one bought on to it. He then asked Arnaud for the rights to the novel, which were accepted (after Arnaud noted that he actually didn't like Clouzot's film). Friedkin brought in Walon Green (most notably the writer of The Wild Bunch) to serve as writer; creating the outline together, the script by Green was done in a number of months. Believe it or not, the script was written for Steve McQueen. However, Friedkin balked at the idea of writing a role for McQueen's new wife Ali MacGraw (or even making her an associate producer rather than giving her a part) and filming it in America (as opposed to the primary location in the Dominican Republic). The failure of the film distressed Friedkin, which he later called "the only film I've made that I can still watch" while also musing that looking back, he would've probably done what he would have had to do to land McQueen for the lead role. While the film did have a bit of a video release, Friedkin sued Paramount and Universal, who had each claimed they didn't know who owned the film when he asked about it when the former had made a new print for a showing (they had formed a joint corporation to do the aforementioned film that folded long ago, as related by Friedkin in interviews such as this) when it came to wanting to restore a print that could be put on DVD and Blu-ray. Friedkin got his wish and served as one of the supervisors on a restored print (as financed by Warner Bros. with distinctly split distribution rights between Paramount, Warner, and Universal) that came out in 2014. His films afterwards were of varying quality that nevertheless were quite watchable, as evidenced by stuff such as Cruising (1980), To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), and Bug (2006); Friedkin died in August of 2023, just a month before the festival premiere of his last feature with The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023).

It is easy to see where the end of the line came for films like this came with its release on June 24, 1977...because of the film that came out just a month before (well, you may know it in Star Wars, and the irony is that Friedkin was handed the script when it was making the studio rounds of rejection and he had doubts about it being made). In the end, no one is just anything, and the sorcerer for this film is (as Friedkin put it) fate. It is undoubtedly a wonderful film in tension, filled with such rough and tumble characters that fits now more than ever with such gritty passion. It is captured with the feeling of a documentary, one that happens to have Tangerine Dream (a German electronic band) compose the music to worthwhile effect for a film that is more than just a trail through the jungle with nitroglycerin on the mind. These four people that we are entrusted to view in the prism of the jungle that they inhabit might as well serve as hell. Schneider seemingly reflects the ideas that Green wanted to show in a "desperately human" role, which namely involves a roughly shaped face and voice that you believe could be your mirror image in the bounds of viewing hell itself. The other players in the games (an assassin, a Palestinian militant, a former banker, and an Irish mobster) that play in fate prove just as well interesting in serving as pawns to toil in the passages of wages and fear. Undoubtedly, the bridge sequence is the showstopper to focus on, not because it serves as the climax or anything, but because of how wonderfully executed and tense it is (the events of how the bridge sequence was staged, which included moving the bridge set piece to Mexico and weird production stories about getting the whole thing done in a matter of months can be found here). It is a sequence that lasts just a bit over ten minutes in an already grimy two-hour runtime but by God does it dominate your attention. If there was any sequence you had to show of the film to try and get someone to at least consider the film, showing even two minutes of it would be more than enough. The sequence right after it, involving a seemingly too tall tree and a good laugh makes for a solid second in the array of interesting sequences of human terror. By the time the film closes off its delirium, you have found a film that has justified its entire reason for being as one filled with edge and style about the dangers that can come with fractured brotherhood on a ticking clock that can fall prey to the whims of fate that reflects how they had set people to their own fate before they reached their reckoning in Columbia. One can only see and hear the ending for what it reflects in what fate means to those who have to endure the choices made (and not made) by oneself. Whether one has seen The Wages of Fear or not when it comes to adaptations of the novel, Sorcerer is a gem you have to experience for yourself with a deep breath and deep admiration for the craftsmanship that is readily apparent in a year that had plenty to go around.

Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.