Flick of the Day: Badlands

One of cinema's true auteur's, Terrence Malick has directed 5 features in nearly 40 years as film-maker with a 20 year hiatus between his second film Days of Heaven in 1978 and 1998's WW2 epic The Thin Red Line for good measure. His work has a tendency toward emphasising the stark beauty of the natural world over the flawed nature of human beings and sparse dialogue. Today's flick of the day is his remarkably self assured début Badlands, based loosely on the 1958 murder spree of Charles Starkweather.

Badlands

Narrated by Holly, played by a very young Sissy Spacek, a young girl who lives with her violent and overbearing father in small town America in the 1950s. One day she meets and ultimately falls in love with rebellious loner Kit, played by the always superb Martin Sheen. Her father, played by Warren Oates perhaps one of the terminally underrated actors of his generation, attempts to drive them apart so in a cold manner Kit shoots him and together the pair hit the road. As they cross the empty plains of the Dakota's, Holly narrates their story like some poetic love story while Kit leaves bodies in his wake everywhere they go. Holly's flowery narration is in stark contrast to the murderous Kit and the beautiful visuals of the American midwest. Eventually their murderous actions lead to a fitting denouement.

While the actions of Kit and Holly are dealt with in a casual manner, Malick is careful never to glamorise them or their predicament but there is no moral judgement. There is also no sensationalism which is something many directors would surely have surrendered themselves to. If anything the film is low-key in dealing with its murderous pair. Malick offers no explanation for their actions and it is tempting to believe from Sheen's bravura performance that it is out of boredom and adolescent ennui as anything else. 

Along with Malick's fantastic visual style, the real star of the film is Martin Sheen. His film is perfectly measured, capturing the studied attempt at James Dean rebellious cool that is Kit. Kit is so busy trying to look cool that he doesn't seem to have time to feel emotions like a normal being. Indeed his cold demeanour is chilling in its way just because of its banality and very much a counterpoint to the girlish naivety of Spacek's Holly. 

Badlands is Malick's best film perhaps because it manages to catch the right balance between the quiet beauty of his visual impulses and narrative tedium, something which could not be said for 2005's The New World, perhaps the dullest couple of hours I have spent in front of a screen. Made for less than $500,000 in 1973 after Malick had spent one year at film school it stands out today for its style, performances and elegiac beauty and as such is one of the defining films of its generation. 

Flick of The Day: Apocalypse Now

All great artistic movements have moved in cycles, with a small scale beginning, a high point of some great work which is swiftly followed by excess, hyperbole and an eventual nadir. The so called New Hollywood movement of the 1970's was no different. Today's flick of the day, Apocalypse Now fits neatly into that curve just past the zenith when the movie brats that had taken over Hollywood began  to become self indulgent creating cinema of monumental excess that would end with Michael Cimino's Heavens Gate. That is not to denigrate Apocalypse for it is a film borne of some amazing talent. A wild ride into the heart of darkness in the Vietnam war. It is, in short, unlike anything else you will ever see.

Apocalypse Now (Two-Disc Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

With a principal shoot lasting well over a year and a post production period that dragged on for another 2 years, this is a film that was literally years in the making. Martin Sheen is Captain Benjamin Willard, a special forces operative on the edge of reason. He is despatched by some shady superiors on a mission upriver into enemy territory to track down and terminate "with extreme prejudice" Colonel Walther Kurtz played by Marlon Brando, a deranged officer who has gone too far and set himself as a demigod in the heart of the Cambodian jungle. What follows is one hell of a trip. As Willard moves upriver, he encounters a surf happy Colonel Kilgore in the Air Cavalry played by an amazingly over the top Robert Duvall who goes into battle blasting out Wagner. He encounters Viet Cong, Playboy Bunnies and madness at every turn before finally reaching Kurtz's compound for a final showdown.

Based on Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now isn't so much an account of the Vietnam War as it is an indictment of the madness of all war transposed onto the Vietnam conflict. It is violent to the point of cruelty at times and overlong but there is much to enjoy here. For a production that was beset with difficulties, storms, Sheen suffering a heart attack and Brando turning up on set bloated and overweight, there are some spectacular set pieces. The dawn helicopter raid and the the arrival at Kurtz's camp are particular highlights. Given the amount of film that was shot, it is amazing Francis Ford Coppola managed to produce the film he did, indeed the film is as famed for what was left out as left in. There are a number of expensively assembled sequences which didn't make the final cut and yet it still feels too long by the end given that it takes so long to arrive at its destination. The film was re-cut for a redux version in 2001, which restores 49 more minutes of footage but this version has always felt as overkill to me.

Ultimately though it doesn't really matter about the length because there is just about enough here that is entertaining and enthralling to carry the film till the inevitable conclusion. One sour note that I feel must be mentioned though is the decision of Coppola to hack in a cow to death with machetes for the climax of the film, in homage to a local tradition. This is a reprehensible act and once again reinforces the feeling that this is the beginning of the end in terms of the New Hollywood movement. It earned the film an "Unacceptable" rating from the American Humane Association. One cannot fail to agree with that sentiment.

Kilgore: Smell that? You smell that? 

Lance: What? 

Kilgore: Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. 

[kneels] 

Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like 

[sniffing, pondering] 

Kilgore: victory. Someday this war's gonna end... 

All in all, this film broke new ground in its portrayal of war, and despite its many flaws, is worth seeing if only for it's place in the history of cinema and the career's of the fine cast which populate it.