REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Kenneth Robinson on good pictures and bad language
Badlands Director/ writer: Terrence'Malick. Stars: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek. 'X' Academy One (93 minutes)
The Front Page Director: Billy Wilder. Stars: Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau. 'AA' Universal (105 minutes) Badlands is the story of a boy in South Dakota who murders his girl friend's father, escapes with her to Montana and gives himself up after killing half-a-dozen people on the way. All the deaths are stylised. You can almost see each character pressing the bulb that releases imitation blood on his shirt. The murderer is very casual about the shooting. So is his girl friend. And so is the only victim to die slowly. This man, an old friend of the killer, has a quiet conversation with him as he lies bleeding. He makes no comment on his unfortunate predicament. He just accepts it.
We, too, are persuaded to accept each killing. Once it is established that the boy intends to destroy anyone who threatens to get in his way we are surprised only if somebody he meets is not destroyed.
When I looked at Badlands a second time I realised that each killing is simply part of a pattern of vivid scenes that make up the film. After one killing comes a series of pictures of a blazing house, with choral accompaniment. After another killing the couple are shown dancing to radio music in the headlights of their car. And after the final killing we,are given an incredibly graceful car chase. Each part of the pattern is introduced with a startling image. It is like turning the pages of a photographic magazine and seeing beauty in unlikely subjects — an oil rig, a giant advertising sign and an architectural folly — and then watching them being used in the. plot of a story. Everything we see — from an old-fashioned front parlour to a passing train glimpsed through a heat-haze — has a sort of dignity, in contrast to the behaviour of the killer and his girl friend. The scenery is consistently beautiful and the killing consistently absurd.
One thing that bothers me is the way the writer-director, Terrence Malick, has written and directed the fugitives into a couple of mere symbols. I don't know if they are even that. What can they be symbolising? Several American critics have tried to see them as Victims of Our Own Time. And there are, in fact, several scenes which suggest that the boy is pleased to regard himself as a James Dean figure — another rebel without a cause. But even this is shown as merely a symptom of his violent behaviour, not as a reason for it.
Where this interesting film fails for me is in its lack of good dialogue. I'm sure Terrence Malick was intending to say something here about the couple's inability to communicate with each other. But this is something he has overplayed. Because the boy and girl say so little I began to feel I was being shut out of their experiences and brought in, as an unwanted observer, only when nothing important was being said. For me there is no substitute for words, even as a way of expressing inadequacy in using them. And that is why the thing I enjoyed most about the film, apart from the good pictures that introduce each scene — hanging motionless, like paint
ings, as a kind of punctuation — is the girl's narration of events. This is spoken, in several bridging passages, in the form of a diary. But here again I got the feeling there were things not being said that could have been said.
This is a film, some critics say, that should be seen twice. I agree. But I also think it is a film that should have been made twice. By the time Terrence Malick has seen his finished version he must have felt he knew his characters well enough to present them more completely. The players? Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek were beautifully directed. If they had been given a few more words we might have seen how well they could act.
There is no shortage of words in The Front Page, Billy Wilder's version of the Hecht-MacArthur play that was first filmed in 1931. I prefer it to Badlands because I cannot do without words for long stretches of time. (I once shocked a cineaste by saying I thought that Blithe Spirit was a great motion picture.) Enormous silences combined with low horizons worry me as much in the cinema as they do in real life. They give me a horrible feeling of unreality. The Front Page is a wonderful contrast to Badlands, a shouting match of a film set among the yellow-pressmen of the late 'twenties. It is gloriously unsubtle and because it is such a period piece you sometimes find yourself laughing at it as well as with it.
I'm glad that this story of a rebellious reporter and the editor who tries to stop him escaping to the Good Life of advertising has not been tidied up too much. A line like "I wouldn't even cover the Last Supper if they held it at the Ambassadors" may seem pretty banal today, but you realise how outrageous it must have seemed when it was written. Most of the film is very theatrical, but when the cameras do get out of doors and away from the stage sets, there is a very funny parody of the car-chase sequences of the period. The plot is so good that I should hate to reveal any of it to readers who don't know it; except to say that as a comment on the awfulness of police, politicians, psychiatrists and newspapermen it is much more robust than anything we might produce today.
This exceptionally entertaining film has Jack Lemmon as the rebellious reporter, Walter Matthau as his boss and a script written by Billy Wilder in collaboration with I. A. L. Diamond. The settings are superbly right for the period, but not for a moment would you suppose you were watching a film made forty years ago. The writers of today have been liberated — if that is the word I want — and the jokes and the language used by the newspapermen are more lurid and indelicate than anything you would find in vintage Hollywood. This, I think, is a pity. I have never gone along with the argument that a story about people who normally use obscenities should feature those obscenities.
But there I go again, revealing my greatest deficiency as a film reviewer. I really care about words.
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