Terrence Malick was 29 when he wrote and directed Badlands. From the off, opinions were divided about him. Nobody was denying that he was bright—Harvard graduate, Rhodes scholar, former lecturer, he's easily the most intellectual of the great US directors who emerged in the 1970s. Prior to Badlands, he'd co-scripted the Paul Newman vehicle Pocket Money and directed a short film, Lanton Mills, with backing from the American Film Institute. Key collaborators were convinced that he was a genius and that Badlands would turn out to be a classic. Other crew members weren't so sure. Several quit during shooting; Malick was a hard taskmaster and—as Martin Sheen recalls—"there just wasn't money for anything" (the film was independently financed and made on a pittance). Still, as the actor told his mutinous colleagues: "Hang on in there. You're gonna be real proud of this."

Badlands is the story of a pair of young killers, inspired by the real-life case of Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, who'd gone on a killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming in the late 1950s, leaving 10 people dead. Malick treats his murderous delinquents with extraordinary tenderness. If Kit (Sheen) is a psychopath, he's a charming one with a James Dean haircut and an engaging sense of self-importance. Holly (Spacek), meanwhile, is a small-town ingénue. In one of the film's most grotesque scenes, we see her gently interrogating a man about the spiders he keeps in jars, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he's just been shot and is bleeding to death. By the time Kit and Holly have hidden away in their tree house in the woods, they seem more akin to Peter Pan and Wendy than Bonnie and Clyde.

Myth has it that Warner Bros bought rights to the movie on the very same day that it acquired Mean Streets. Despite whisperings that Malick was a very special talent indeed, box-office was far from brisk, while Pauline Kael accused Malick of being condescending to his white, working-class protagonists. "I didn't admire it, I didn't enjoy it, and I don't like it. It's all rhetoric," she wrote in The New Yorker. Since its release in 1974, though, its reputation has continued to grow.

Set in the 1950s, Badlands has a curiously timeless feel. Its imagery of long, empty roads and dusty small towns is as evocative of the Depression era as of Eisenhower's America. The scenes in the woods or by the river, in which Kit and Holly create their own make-believe world, are in the spirit of Mark Twain's Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Malick refuses to moralise about his protagonists, and his carefree, non-judgemental approach has influenced countless other film-makers—notably, in recent years, David Gordon Green (George Washington) and Harmony Korine (Gummo).

When film-makers resort to poetic voice-overs, it sometimes signifies they don't have enough good footage to show their story effectively. Nobody is going to level that accusation at Malick, who's used voice-overs with extraordinary subtlety throughout his career. Here, there's something eerie and unsettling about Spacek's homely narration. She sounds like the girl-next-door, whimsical, homely and a little fey, but both she and Kit have lost their moral compass. Although capable of loving each other, they're so detached from the world around them that they don't feel the slightest twinge of conscience as they leave corpses in their wake, the motivation for the killings absurdly slight. Kit claims that "the more I looked at people, the more I hated them, because I knowed there wasn't any place for me," but he never gives the impression that he's consumed with loathing.

Malick has only made three features during his career. He's reportedly in Morocco with his production designer Jack Fisk (Spacek's husband) plotting a fourth, but rarely surfaces in public. "He's just very humble," his editor Robert Estrin says of him. "People think of him like JD Salinger, as this reclusive monk of a director, but he's nothing like that." Whatever his personality, it's no surprise that he's declined to be interviewed or to offer a director's commentary for this DVD release. The work, his collaborators insist in the Making Of... documentary included on the disc, speaks for itself. "I don't really like to be asked my opinions of my own films because the feelings I have right now I wouldn't trust," he stated not long after the release of Badlands. "Perhaps when I have 10 films behind me, I will have something worth saying." At his current rate of productivity, that'll be in about 50 years time...

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