Bad To The Bone- Martin Sheen And Sissy Spacek’s Badlands-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Badlands, starring Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, 1973

Watching the film under review, Badlands, made me thing back to the days when my own corner boys were taking their various turns toward life decisions which led some of them to plenty of time in various state pens and others into white collar professional life. One guy from the corner in particular reminded me of Kit, the sullen, cranky, whacko, maybe even misunderstood youth played by Martin Sheen, a guy named Pretty James Preston (who got the name Pretty from all the girls who swarmed around him from junior high on and the name stuck) who ended face down in a hail of bullets after killing a security guard in a botched lone wolf bank holdup. He, seemingly like Kit, had not started out as a desperado but everywhere he turned he got bumped around by society, got bumped around by his own inner hurts and outrageous wanting habits. Of course in those day, the 1950s, the same time frame of this film and Pretty’s time too such sullen youth, called juvenile delinquents, JDs, were seen as almost as much as a threat to the good social order as the Cold War Red Menace that made every self-respecting person nervous (and so thought maybe the Reds had put those guys up to their wicked ways).                   

Here is the way this one played out in Badlands, played out not all that differently than a lot of other corner boy stories from back then except Kit went way over the edge like Pretty James had done. Played out as told in appropriate flash-back fashion by Holly, played by Sissy Spacek, the girl who rode out the storms of his young life with him and an eyewitness to his moods and madnesses. See Kit was just drifting around out there in the foothills of the badlands (the physical place and the place in his head), playing the dime store cowboy philosopher king when he hitched up with Holly, a young impressible young girl of fifteen who seemed like him in many ways, not much of a talker keeping her own counsel who opened up as Kit got a stronger hold on her. They fell in love, the old-fashioned for keeps kind. The problem though was that Holly’s single parent father saw nothing but evil, or maybe his younger self in Kit and banished Kit from seeing Holly. But you didn’t so that to Kit, you didn’t not let him have what he wanted as it turned out. So naturally in order to solve the problem Kit shot the old man dead in his own home. And called Holly, called her on her love for him to go away with him on the run-which way would she go.          

In the short haul she went with Kit, blew town after Kit burned her father’s house down to hide evidence or something (our boy didn’t always think everything out in the right direction). From then on they were on the run. First setting up camp in an almost Adam and Eve “paradise” wilderness fast. But something evil, banally evil, got triggered in Kit by that first killing. Maybe he got blood simple like a lot of guys, maybe he saw that his place in the sun was his fifteen minutes of fame as a mass murderer. Who knows all anybody knew was that when threatened he shot first and asked questions later. And Holly stuck by him until even she saw there was no future with her man, and that he was in a different place. So one day she just stopped after another one of Kit’s shoot-outs. Hell, even he stopped once he knew he had run out of room even in the vast Badlands. Maybe that said it all, In any case they executed him without a whimper. As for Holly, well, she told us the story so she survived and prospered in the end. Damn, but if this story didn’t remind me of Pretty James Preston and I close I came to that same fate. See this one.