In my view, Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1974) is a bit too visually polished for a movie about a killer and his girlfriend on the lam.  But unforgettable shots and sounds (in the score) proliferate, and Malick’s writing can be brilliant.

Kit and Holly, “lovers”, are ever busy acting and thinking, acting and thinking, but never cease to be victims of their own disjointed minds.  They allow a kind of paralysis, certainly a moral one, to overtake them, and if we infer that this is due to alienation, John Simon dealt with that subject in his superb 1974 review of the film.  He wrote that “Badlands sees alienation as it is: the incapacity or unwillingness to recognize the humanity of others . . .”  This indeed describes Kit (Martin Sheen), the actual murderer, but also Holly (Sissy Spacek), who murders no one.

Cover of Badlands

The plot of the 1959 German film, The Bridge, is pivoted on this:  “In the very last days of World War II a group of seven German high-school friends are hastily impressed into the army” (Stanley Kauffmann).  A country in trouble, perhaps, is willing to recruit its sixteen-year-old boys, and although the boys here are meant to be relatively safe, they are not.

What comes about is not only the usual fog of war but also the savage folly of war—of a war conducted by a country, Germany, whose ideals have been hijacked by scoundrels.  (So claims the boys’ teacher.)  Domestic drama in the boys’ lives is eclipsed by battlefield horrors.

Directed by Bernhard Wicki, The Bridge is authentically anti-war, a famous old Euro-artwork still vivid and meaningful.

(In German with English subtitles)

It is the mid 1950s and Leonard Marnham, the English “innocent” of Ian McEwan’s 1990 novel The Innocent, has joined a group of mostly Americans in an espionage endeavor in Berlin.  A tunnel is to be used for spying on the Soviets (a real-life venture), and Leonard is duly put to technical work.  By and by he becomes romantically involved with a German woman called Maria, whose ex-husband occasionally, drunkenly batters her. . . An agonizing episode drives Leonard and Maria to kill the ex-husband in self-defense, and since the Berlin law cannot be trusted in this instance, the desperate couple dismember the lout’s body and place the parts in suitcases.  Alas, the love affair is undermined by this, and after a while the spying operation is subverted.

What Leonard encounters is a non-political violence between wars—the war against the Nazis and the Cold War.  The violence of the ex-husband is an ordinary violence, but no less shattering to the individual than national or collective violence.  Violence, like life, goes on, in war or in peace, and often it paves the way for either betrayal or what looks like betrayal, as it does here.

The trauma and the contingency which James Wood says McEwan’s novels (e.g. Atonement) are about rush to the fore in this gripping book.  They aren’t pretty.

The Innocent (novel) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As France’s Eric Rohmer got older, his films got better.  Pauline at the Beach (1982) is a minor case in point.  Herein, a 40ish Lothario and an obtuse young man unable to win back an ex-girlfriend make a mess of things in their small-scale world.  In her own way, so does lovely Marion (Arielle Dombasle), the cousin of 15-year-old Pauline (Amanda Langlet), who receives the brunt of it all.  The attitudes of the adult characters dismay, although I’m afraid Pauline Kael was right that Rohmer “can’t resist setting up the little girl [i.e. Pauline] as our moral instructor.”

All the same, the film is likable and crisp and less boring than such Rohmer pictures as My Night at Maud’s.  As always with Rohmer, there is much conversation, but an advantage exists in revealing things through conversation rather than sound bites.  And even on DVD Nestor Almendros’s summer-season cinematography looks great.

Cover of Pauline at the Beach

(In French with English subtitles.)

In Black Angel, from 1946, there is a veneer of pulp entertainment hiding a chunk of despair.  As in The Blue Dahlia, a naughty woman is murdered, albeit here a betrayed wife (June Vincent) strives for the exoneration of the luckless husband who did not do it.  Dan Duryea is persuasive as an alcoholic Mr. Ordinary who joins and falls for the Vincent character.  Circumstance and Time, in that order, start leaving people rattled.  That justice gets done hardly gives rise to bright conciliation.

Adapted from a Cornell Woolrich novel, fruitfully directed by Roy William Neill, Black Angel has no wonderful climax—and is nearly too simple—but is still provocative and agreeable.  I like a movie where a woman (Vincent) asserts herself against a man (who means her no harm) in a normal manner and is then necessarily sympathetic to him.  It’s smarter than what we get from today’s movies.