One of the songs heard over the evocative soundtrack of Badlands is Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange”. That sentiment reverberates in the film, as a James Dean look-alike (Martin Sheen) blazes a trail of destruction across America’s badlands in the 1950s while his story is lovingly recorded in her journal by the girl, Holly (Sissy Spacek), he takes with him. The brutality of his progress is counterpointed by her oddly tender narration and her faulty assessment of what might interest and appeal to her audience. With the action filtered through a child-like vision, augmented by poetic photography and a hauntingly original soundtrack, the director keeps the audience at some remove from easy moral judgments, detaching them with a romanticised impression of murder and madness.

This extraordinary first feature proved Malick to be a true original, a Mark Twain for the modern age, with a sensitive eye and ear for the myths that accrete around the American landscape, and a complex sense of childhood, innocence, nature, and fate.