Terrence Malick · 1973 · road

Terrence Malick's 1973 film, loosely built on the Starkweather killings. A twenty-five-year-old garbage man and a fifteen-year-old girl leave a small South Dakota town after he shoots her father, and drive north-west across the plains toward Montana. She narrates the whole thing in the flat, borrowed language of movie magazines, which is the point.

1. 1
   Fort Dupree

   Kit collects rubbish in a South Dakota town and Holly twirls a baton on the lawn, and when her father objects Kit shoots him and burns the house - and Holly leaves with him because the alternative is staying.

2. 2
   The Badlands

   They live a while in a treehouse in the cottonwoods, then run for the badlands, killing bounty hunters and a friend on the way, in a landscape that empties by the mile and a narration that never registers alarm.

3. 3
   Montana

   Out across the Montana plains in a stolen Cadillac with the National Guard behind them, Kit stops, builds a cairn where he was caught, and goes cheerfully to a celebrity he understood in advance.