Badlands (1973)

When I got to the end of this film and saw Terrence Malick’s name pop up with a director’s credit, I was so surprised I said “Terrence Malick directed this???” out loud. (Roommate Russ was in the kitchen and just gave me a long stare before saying “Uh….yes?”) I’ve already got a soft spot for Malick, but it was based on some of his later films like The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, both of which I watched for non-Malick reasons (one was a Best Picture nominee one year, one has John Cusack in it). This film was his debut, and had baby versions of his tropes that drew me to him – and some were the bits I liked, so I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised. Malick loosely based this tale on the Starkweather Homicides, a series of spree killings in the Midwest in the late 1950s that began with a squabble between 18-year-old Charles Starkweather and the disapproving parents of his girlfriend Caril Fulgate (she was only 13, which explains their objection). After shooting Caril’s…