THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
TOWN & COUNTRY O O O O O O O O O O O O O O THE SCREEN Even before you have seen Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Terence Malick's Badlands, you know from the titles that these two films are...
...NYR itself was interested enough to withdraw its own cooperation and threaten the publisher, Charterhouse, with lawsuits...
...Thus, the oft-postponed appearance of Intellectual Skywriting became an "event" and "everybody" waited to see the reviews of the book that reviews the reviews of all the other books...
...NYR was founded just over ten years ago during the New York newspaper strike by a half-dozen intellectuals and journalists who were convinced their community needed a publication that --unlike the Sunday New York Times, the Herald-Tribune and Saturday Review-took books seriously enough to talk about them at length and sometimes get angry at the trivial, the venal, the inflated and the fraudulent...
...It makes him a recognized man in the community, as they say...
...In fact, putting a construction on events is precisely what Scorsese is trying to avoid...
...The central character in Badlands plays a more eccentric role in Mean Streets, but the role is still the same...
...One day Kit shoots his girlfriend's father (Warren Oates) and then lights out from the South Dakota town where he grew up, taking the girl, Holly (Sissy Spacek), with him...
...Though Mean Streets has been in circulation for months now, while Badlands went into commercial release only recently, both had showcase premieres at the New York Film Festival last fall and got good press as a result...
...Looked at in this way, the way the filmmakers themselves seem to have wanted us to look, the comparison between the two films becomes invidious...
...It was born and thrived in one of the most morally ambiguous decades in our history: not in the sense that the moral horror of Vietnam remained forever I0 May 1974:240...
...The line in Kit's mind between beasts and men is so fine, he crosqes it without really noticing...
...The films are indeed alike...
...On a desultory crossprairie ramble he shoots half dozen people or so, including his only friend...
...On the contrary, it appears that just about everyone ("everyone" in the sense that everyone goes to the cocktail party after the National Book Awards) was interested...
...After Kit kills Holly's father, he and Holly literally set up housekeeping in a tree, escaping to the forest where domestic life becomes a sort of animal life...
...Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly (March 11, 1974) has printed a warm evaluation of N YR which both balances off and praises the Nobile version...
...NYR editors also sense that the best journalists are also moralists...
...His sense of what he is doing making a movie is purely dramatic...
...Kit (Martin Sheen) in Badlands and Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) in Mean Streets are a couple of crazies...
...His capture provides him with the escape from anonymity he's been after...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...He is attempting to achieve only credibility--to get us to believe that the punks who live in Little Italy really behave this way...
...Each is a noun and an adjective, an uncomplimentary description of an unspecified place...
...After he quits the job on the garbage truck, he moves back to the other end of the food chain, working in the feeding pens at the stockyards...
...Later still, after the corpses begin being human, Kit hides one of them in an old refrigerator car, the sort used to ship freshly dressed meat to market...
...You're a real individual," his guard remarks in disbelief at something he has said...
...They are about the quality of life in a particular landscape...
...The psychology of his characters is the only thing that guides Scorsese's direction and makes it coherent from scene to scene...
...But he too brings out in the open the violence of the society in which he lives, New York's Little Italy, and his only friend (Harvey Keitel) is also his victim, though not by his own hand...
...Since the film is set in 1959 and based on real and notorious characters---Charlie Starkweather and his girlfriendma factual recreation might seem even more likely here than in Mean Streets...
...In an atmosphere where moral authority takes such brutal, brutish form, Kit's actions begin to make grotesque sense to us...
...As we have come to understand, however, everything Kit has been up to until this moment is ordinary in these bad lands...
...He and Holly are themselves the offspring of a culture in which, Malick makes it increasingly clear, the civil and the animal are intermingled, ambiguous, confused...
...pay him good money and promise him all the space he wants...
...Scorsese, than are dreamt of in your philosophy...
...There too, Kit booby-traps the area in case the law comes...
...Malick wants something additional and harder: that we also understand from his characters' actions what is going on inside his head...
...It shows how much better and more intricately made Badlands is...
...BOOKS REVIEWING THE REVIEW (NY) RAYMOND A. SCHROTH Intellectual Skywriting PHILIP NOBILE Charterhouse, $7.95 When I casually mentioned to a fellowcorrespondent at the Democratic Convention, a writer for the New York Review o/ Books, that Philip Nobile was hard at work on a book about NYR she replied that she couldn't imagine how anyone would be interested...
...And they will give space to stylists--Murray Kempton, Wilfrid Sheed, Gore Vidal and Garry Wills--men read not necessarily because we believe them (although I usually believe at least two) but because watching each word follow on the last is like watching those waves the surfers follow around the world--rolling, tumbling, crashing climactically in a foamy white spray...
...One thing he does is to dig and camouflage a pit that we take to be a trap, one into which the hunter will fall as if he were the hunted...
...But when the hunters who come are bounty hunters (speaking of members of society who cross too easily the line between animals and men), the pit he had Commowneal: 239 dug is in fact used as a blind from which Kit can shoot them...
...send them to the best authoritative writer you can think of (and whose views at least have the editor's respect...
...From touches like this we begin to understand how Malick thinks Kit's violence gains him access to polite society...
...This fits his idea of his characters and their lives, which is correspondingly simple...
...His film, in other words, is made on .the assumption that a raw, documentary look will persuade us that what we are seeing is real...
...And on top of that, they seem to be leading similarly charmed lives...
...But Malick's is thematic, and his sense of himself guides him in the making of his film...
...and a number of critics were interested enough to strop their razors, ready for Nobile's throat...
...His film is a rough one by design...
...and there, later on, he noses around the carcass of a cow one morning with the same idle curiosity he showed for the dog...
...Thus a review in NYR is not simply a report and a judgment on a book but an independent essay on the whole field---disarmament, witchcraft, psychohistory, sex and crumbling Catholicism --plus the reviewer's lofty or visceral vision of the question at hand...
...norm in his film, Malick's celebrities are an extreme made to imply a norm...
...Kit's murderousness arises from his proximity to dead animals as casually and naturally as his fame arises from his anonymity...
...Beginning with the opening scene, in which Kit inspects the corpse of a dog left out on his garbage route, Badlands is in essence a series of vignettes about dead animals...
...But Malick has gone in the opposite direction...
...Scorsese's approach to his subject is direct and uncomplicated...
...But the cloud images, as if Kit were going to heaven instead, are appropriate...
...Each is its director's first feature and has been doing well at the box office...
...Malick's Badlands has a more circuitous approach to reality...
...The films sound related, like the city slicker and his country cousin...
...The moments of greatest violence become, peculiarly, the moments of greatest civility...
...What is more, as the titles of both films imply, they are not about individual characters so much as the spirit of a place...
...Although done in Technicolor and having the production values of a fiction film, visually Mean Streets seems to have come out of the same bag as those rock-festival documentaries popular a few years ago...
...Kit doesn't mind the sarcasm because an "individual" is just what he's been trying to become...
...Over a hundred of its writers, friends and enemies were interested enough to tell their stories to the intrepid Nobile --apparently anxious to score more points for the record in decade-old debates, embarrass an editor who had treated them badly, or simply help a determined young man put together what could be a very important analysis of those ten painful years in which America's best critical minds were divided on what kind of a nation America was...
...Nobile himself has heightened interest in his project by spilling the tale of what he injudiciously calls his own legal "Gethsemane" first to the journalism review (MORE) (April 1973), and then in New Times (April 5, 1974), where he drops a few of-course-Ican'ttell-you tidbits about the sex lives of the NYR crowd...
...There are more things in this heaven and earth Malick has created for Kit, Mr...
...While Johnny Boy is capable of equally erratic behavior--the first time we see him, he is blowing up a corner mailbox for laughsmhe seems at the beginning only a minor fly in the pure olive oil of his friends' lives...
...Earlier, when Holly's father wanted to punish her for seeing Kit, he shot her dog and threw it into the river...
...TOWN & COUNTRY O O O O O O O O O O O O O O THE SCREEN Even before you have seen Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Terence Malick's Badlands, you know from the titles that these two films are somehow alike...
...Even in the ill-lit bar which is a main set Scorsese seems to have restricted himself to available light, working with fast, grainy color and, at times, a hand-held camera...
...Scorsese hopes only that we can understand from his characters' actions what is going on inside their heads...
...Its formula was simple: collect a group of books on the same subject (which correspond with the editor's tastes and concerns...
...Maybe they do, for all I know...
...After he shoots that former friend, for instance, Kit opens a door for the man as he stumbles blindly toward his house...
...Almost none of the film was shot out on the street where conditions might have required such crude technique, but Scorsese apparently wanted his film to look like cindma veritd anyhow...
...Where Scorsese's punks are the...
...To accomplish this Malick must put a construction on events unlike anything Seorsese attempts...
...At the end the camera is trained on sunlit layers of clouds outside the window of an airplane transporting Kit to stand trial...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 10
