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It's easy to be uneasy about Badlands
because Terrence Malick has written and
directed it in a style one could call American
Naive, and the genre is new.
Without precedent or cinematic reference,
the film unfolds as an ingenuous How I
Spent My Summer Vacation and remains so
firmly rocte-d in its straightforward naivete
thit an audience, unaccustomed to this point
of view, is often caught wandering if the
laughs are intentional.
Ladlands is essentially a tale of romance
and murder, in that order, told by an
adolescent South Dakota girl in the mid
1950's. She narrates, and co-stars in, her
little short story, but she doesn't tell it as
melodrama at all. Her narration is filled with
the fake grandeur and false poetry one would
expect. She talks about destiny and serene
days, and every line sounds as hollow and
artificial as it probably would be, coming
from h:r.
Holly calls Kit the most trigger-happy
person I'd ever met. Well, he was that. She
was out in the front yard one day, twirling
her baton, when Kit walked up and asked her
if she wanted to go for a ride. Their meeting
didn't have the sexual implications of Bonnie
and Clyde's. Taking a ride was just better
than twirling a baton.
Their odyssey of casual, even apathetic,
murder is told by Holly in a detached, simple
manner. She never questions why she stays
with the eccentric Kit, and the whole
experience just makes her feel kinda blah,
like when you're sitting there and "all the
water's run out of the bathtub. Her similes
are positively childlike, and her reactions are
consistent.
For Malick is consistent, too. Badlands is
his first film, and a fully realized one. It's
most obvious with the actors, who
comprehend the naive style right from the
start and do their best to make the audience
comfortable with it. Martin Sheen doesn't
play Kit as James Dean, but he still allows
the comparison to assert itself where it will.
We see him as Holly does, which is as it
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should be: a hellbent delinquent, guileless
and attractive even to the end.
Sissy Spacek is frecklefaced Holly, the
unsophisticated observer who is not so much
gullible as merely game, in a primitive way.
But it is the look of the film which does as
much as Holly's narration to involve us in
the unique style of Badlands. .Malick
subordinates the quick cut to the more
formalized fade, and subconsciously, we
think Holly might be reading from her diary.
The photography, credited to three
newcomers, often suffuses a John Ford
composition with a Maxfield Parrish color,
and the result is stunning. (The Parrish
influence extends to the poster outside the
theatre; and Spacek even has Parrish-gold
hair!)
Malick likes to shoot a desolate landscape
with a single object interrupting the space.
My favorite was a shot of a painted-primitive
billboard against the too-true-blue skies.
Even his musical gamble of substituting Erik
Satie for the easier rock and roll pays off.
It would-be a pity to dismiss Badlands as a
peculiar piece. It's not a film to excite as
much as to intrigue and, in a very
uncomplicated way, to entertain. .
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by Harvey Elliott
Badlands See review on this page.
(Through Thursday at the Plaza I.)
Blazing Saddles This Mel Brooks film
is fitfully hilarious, but as Brooks gets
broader and broader, the hilarity becomes
deadened by too much of a good thing. It
gets off .to a spectacular start with Frankie
Laine and a bullwhip singing the title song
while big, fat, Fifties credits appear on the
screen. And the first scene, with a character
actor you'll remember from Paper Moon
and a black chain gang, is the funniest in the
entire film. Madeleine Kahn and Harvey
Korman steal what's left of the movie, but
Mel Brooks' mugging is embarrassing.
(Through Thursday, if not longer, at the
Plaza 2.)
Fiddler on the RooJ a big, epic transfer
of Broadway's penultimate ethnic musical to
the screen. In general, it opens up nicely in its
Yugoslavian locales and provides an
exuberant sweep to many scenes. Some of
the musical numbers are cincmatically
exciting (Miracles of Miracles and Sunrise,
Sunset come immediately to mind, as well as
the lesser-known Chaveleh), and others just
seem to go on and on. It was all filmed
through a stocking, and that's why it looks so
golden. Leonard Frey, Rosalind Harris and
Neva Small are excellent. (Last day today, at
the Varsity.)
Jeremiah Johnson Even Robert
Red ford's carefully programmed charisma
couldn't distinguish this outdoor adventure
story when it was released almost two years
ago, but in these glorious Gatsby days, never
Man against
- it's the same
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let a sleeping Redford lie.
nature, man against Indians
old story filmed in a lot of wilderness by
Sydney Pollack. The screenplay is partly
written by John Milius, a macho cult figure.
(Through Thursday, at the Carolina.)
On the Waterfront This Elia Kazan
classic might not have the impact now that it
had back in 1954, when American
moviegoers were primed for Brando, the
Method and screen naturalism, but it's one
of the few films which can be said to
epitomize a decade of movie history. Critics
have commented that Kazan's mannered
hysteria dates very quickly, but the film
contains Marlon Brando's electrifying
performance and is worth seeing. An
interesting historical note: it has been called
Kazan's justification for appearing as a
friendly witness during the McCarthy
hearings. The Brando character, you see,
agonizes over informing. (Thursday, 8:30,
Carolina Union free flick.)
One Day in the Life oj Ivan Deniso vich a
somber and visually faithful rendering of
Solzhenitsyn's story of one man's day-to-day
survival in a Siberian labor camp. The camp
was recreated 200 miles north of Oslo, from
sketches by a former inmate, and the cast
and crew underwent many of the same
hardships and deprivations as Ivan himself.
Tom Courtenay practically starved himself
during the filming. And the experience is
cinematically captured by cinematographer
Sven Nykvist, who is responsible for at least
half of Ingmar Bergman's renown, and who
finally won an Oscar this year for Cries and
Whispers. (Wednesday at 8 p.m.. Gross
Chemistry Auditorium, Duke.)
The Trojan Women Katherinc
Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Genevieve
Bujold and Irene Papas enact Euri pedes, and
the results weren't exactly pleasing to
everybody. Pauline Kael, however, wrote
that director Michael Cacoyannis (Elektra.
Zorha the Greek) tries to make the movie
impressive and botches it. but I think one
would have to be maybe a little foolish' to let
aesthetic scruples about the movie's
mediocrity as cinema deprive one of seeing
The Trojan Women with a cast that one
could never hope to see on the stage. Enough
said. (Tonight, 8:30, Carolina Union free
flick.)
The Way We Were Robert Redford's
best acting to date; maybe it's because he
plays a character to whom everything came
too easy. At any rate, theStrcisand-Rcdford
chemistry works here to produce an
involving enjoyable romantic drama as
long as it sticks to Streisand and Redford.
Everybody else, however, turns to
caricature, and, with the exception of a few
scenes (notably Redford and Bradford
Dillman in a sailboat), everything seems like
filler in a story about Those Two. It
shouldn't have turned out that way.
(Through Thursday, at Plaza 3.)
Welcome to Arrow Beach Laurence
Harvey's last film. He directed and starred in
it, and Variety calls it inept and distasteful
... a lame-brained tale of cannibalism. It
seems Harvey developed a taste for human
flesh during the Korean War. (Starts
Wednesday, at the Varsity.)
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