This isn't shown on TV much and as far as I can tell it's not available on DVD. I don't know why not, because it's pretty good.
Terrence Malik's "Badlands", a fictionalized parallel, is shown often enough that some of us, myself included, get Malik's poetry mixed up with the real events surrounded the spree killer Charles Starkweather in the late 1950s. Starkweather was a nineteen-year-old ex garbage man who ran off with his girl friend, Caril Ann Fugate (pronounced FEW-gate in Lincoln) and killed eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming before being caught and executed.
It's difficult to tell who is the more terrifying murderer -- Martin Sheen in "Badlands" or Tim Roth in "Murder in the Heartland." I suppose Sheen is, because he cares so little that he's wildly unpredictable, whereas Roth is a perfectly normal psychopath who gloats over his notoriety and who follows the usual path of building a tiny social structure around himself, creating a model kingdom of his own, in which his captives do exactly what they're ordered to do. If the pieces on the board don't follow instructions, Roth kills them. He kills them anyway, but for a few minutes he gets to look into the horrified eyes of the victim he's pointing his shotgun at. Charles Manson did a much better job with HIS kingdom.
Sheen wasn't the dumbass that Roth is. Sheen's was a far more complicated character. There's a hilarious scene in "Badlands" in which Sheen is lying on a couch in the mansion of a captive family and leaves choice bits of wisdom to others on a tape recorder. "Remember, the majority rules -- but don't ignore the minority."
Roth has this unblinking stare when he aims his shotgun at someone. He never carries the weapon casually, holding it at hip level. Even when the captive is a few feet away, Roth aims the gun carefully, as if at a distant target. The description of Starkweather given by the psychiatrist is accurate. Charlie looks bored much of the time, hungry for stimuli.
Roth is truly unnerving, but then the whole film is above average. The production values are high. Extras abound and the period detail is mostly accurate -- the songs, the cars, the clothing, the general STYLE of the digitally inclined and featureless Midwest with its grain elevators and tractor supply warehouses that has produced its share of bizarre murders -- Starkweather, Ed Gein, Tina Brandon, the intrepid duo of "In Cold Blood."
Science knows virtually nothing about these kinds of crimes. They're preposterous. We can all understand someone impulsively murdering a spouse, a friend, a parent. They're people we care about, whose opinions of us we value, and who are in a position to hurt us. But to kill a stranger just because you CAN?
The reaction of the community is predictable. As the news spreads, everyone panics. The National Guard is called into Lincoln and a curfew is imposed. Military vehicles roar up and down the streets. They're going to find and kill Charlie Starkweather with a Browning .30 caliber light machine gun mounted on a Jeep. Or maybe a tank will run him down. The governor visits the mansion where the bodies of a pillar of the community and his wife have been found. The governor goes ape because Charlie has walked into the home of a prominent citizen and killed two or three people. The governor doesn't make a big deal out of the murder of a garbage man, two teens on a date, the maid, or others of lower "social worth", as the sociologist Anselm Strauss once designated them.
Part I of this miniseries deals with the crime spree; Part 2 deals with the trials. Starkweather gets the chair in an unnecessarily graphic execution scene. Fugate gets life, but is released early. The jury understandably had trouble making up its mind about Fugate. She was only fourteen and in the eighth grade. How culpable could she be? And it's my experience that women do not take up shotguns and deliberately kill people. If my marriage taught me nothing else, it's that they prefer death by lethal insult.
Terrence Malik's "Badlands", a fictionalized parallel, is shown often enough that some of us, myself included, get Malik's poetry mixed up with the real events surrounded the spree killer Charles Starkweather in the late 1950s. Starkweather was a nineteen-year-old ex garbage man who ran off with his girl friend, Caril Ann Fugate (pronounced FEW-gate in Lincoln) and killed eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming before being caught and executed.
It's difficult to tell who is the more terrifying murderer -- Martin Sheen in "Badlands" or Tim Roth in "Murder in the Heartland." I suppose Sheen is, because he cares so little that he's wildly unpredictable, whereas Roth is a perfectly normal psychopath who gloats over his notoriety and who follows the usual path of building a tiny social structure around himself, creating a model kingdom of his own, in which his captives do exactly what they're ordered to do. If the pieces on the board don't follow instructions, Roth kills them. He kills them anyway, but for a few minutes he gets to look into the horrified eyes of the victim he's pointing his shotgun at. Charles Manson did a much better job with HIS kingdom.
Sheen wasn't the dumbass that Roth is. Sheen's was a far more complicated character. There's a hilarious scene in "Badlands" in which Sheen is lying on a couch in the mansion of a captive family and leaves choice bits of wisdom to others on a tape recorder. "Remember, the majority rules -- but don't ignore the minority."
Roth has this unblinking stare when he aims his shotgun at someone. He never carries the weapon casually, holding it at hip level. Even when the captive is a few feet away, Roth aims the gun carefully, as if at a distant target. The description of Starkweather given by the psychiatrist is accurate. Charlie looks bored much of the time, hungry for stimuli.
Roth is truly unnerving, but then the whole film is above average. The production values are high. Extras abound and the period detail is mostly accurate -- the songs, the cars, the clothing, the general STYLE of the digitally inclined and featureless Midwest with its grain elevators and tractor supply warehouses that has produced its share of bizarre murders -- Starkweather, Ed Gein, Tina Brandon, the intrepid duo of "In Cold Blood."
Science knows virtually nothing about these kinds of crimes. They're preposterous. We can all understand someone impulsively murdering a spouse, a friend, a parent. They're people we care about, whose opinions of us we value, and who are in a position to hurt us. But to kill a stranger just because you CAN?
The reaction of the community is predictable. As the news spreads, everyone panics. The National Guard is called into Lincoln and a curfew is imposed. Military vehicles roar up and down the streets. They're going to find and kill Charlie Starkweather with a Browning .30 caliber light machine gun mounted on a Jeep. Or maybe a tank will run him down. The governor visits the mansion where the bodies of a pillar of the community and his wife have been found. The governor goes ape because Charlie has walked into the home of a prominent citizen and killed two or three people. The governor doesn't make a big deal out of the murder of a garbage man, two teens on a date, the maid, or others of lower "social worth", as the sociologist Anselm Strauss once designated them.
Part I of this miniseries deals with the crime spree; Part 2 deals with the trials. Starkweather gets the chair in an unnecessarily graphic execution scene. Fugate gets life, but is released early. The jury understandably had trouble making up its mind about Fugate. She was only fourteen and in the eighth grade. How culpable could she be? And it's my experience that women do not take up shotguns and deliberately kill people. If my marriage taught me nothing else, it's that they prefer death by lethal insult.