Badlands

American cinema in the '70s may be marked as much by pretension, excess, and indulgence as by auteurist genius. But I was hard-pressed not to regard it with nostalgia and the sense of a lost golden age after re-viewing Terence Malick's stunning debut masterpiece Badlands (1974), which is being re-released in a new print at the Coolidge Corner.

Taking the genial criminal anomie of Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde a step deeper into absurdity and lack of affect, Badlands, which is based on the '50s killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, begins with garbageman Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen in his best performance) wooing Holly (Sissy Spacek, ditto) with his James Dean looks and his cool banality. She's smitten, but her dad (Warren Oates, threatening and pitiable) objects. He's their first victim, and Holly's home burns to a Carl Orff chorus.

Narrated by Holly from diary entries that are part teen-magazine drivel, part surreal epiphanies ("We had our troubles, like most couples. He said I was just along for the ride. I wished he would fall in the river and drown so I could watch."), the pair kill not from homicidal passion but out of ineptitude and annoyance. A chronicle of non-sequiturs and disassociation, their non-comprehending odyssey is swallowed up by the landscape, a Montana all flatness and void, tinged only by sunsets or the cloud of dust engulfing their getaway car. At times Malick's irony seems condescending, but in such scenes as when Holly asks a dying victim about his pet spider, it touches genuine nightmare.

"You're quite an individual," a lawman remarks to the handcuffed Kit at the end. "Do you think they'll take that into consideration?" the neophyte celebrity replies. In today's culture of celebrated depravity, he wouldn't have to worry. At the Coolidge Corner.

-- Peter Keough