Bloody Mama (1970) American International/Action-Drama RT: 90 minutes Rated R (bloody violence, nudity, sexual content, rape, language, drug use) Director: Roger Corman Screenplay: Robert Thom Music: Don Randi Cinematography: John A. Alonzo Release date: March 24, 1970 (US) Cast: Shelley Winters, Pat Hingle, Don Stroud, Diane Varsi, Bruce Dern, Clint Kimbrough, Robert De Niro, Robert Walden, Alex Nicol, Pamela Dunlap, Michael Fox, Scatman Crothers, Stacy Harris, Lisa Jill, Steve Mitchell, Roy Idom. Box Office: $1.5M (US)
Rating: ***
The Depression-era gangster film Bloody Mama is no lark. It’s a dour affair that doesn’t even try to turn Ma Barker and her sons into folk heroes like Arthur Penn did with Bonnie and Clyde three years prior. What’s heroic about rape, incest, sadism and cold-blooded murder? Nothing, that’s what. Director Roger Corman (The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre) takes a completely serious approach to this crime drama chronicling the violent career of the Barker Gang. The result is a compelling, sometimes unsettling film that broke several taboos when it came out in 1970, a mere three years after the abolition of the outdated Production Code.
Two-time Oscar winner Shelley Winters (The Diary of Anne Frank, A Patch of Blue) stars as Kate “Ma” Barker, a deranged woman who led her four equally disturbed sons on a violent, multistate crime spree in the early 30s. An opening scene shows young Kate being raped by her father while her two brothers held her down. She grew up to be living proof of what Nietzsche said about that which does not kill us. In adulthood, she’s the loving mother (a little too loving if you know I mean) of four who genuinely believes her boys can do no wrong. Oh, but they can and they have! They’re bad boys, VERY bad boys. The oldest Herman (Stroud, Angel Unchained) is psychotic. Lloyd (De Niro, Taxi Driver) is a junkie. Fred (Walden, Lou Grant) is a gay masochist. Arthur (Kimbrough, Night Call Nurses) is the quiet, pragmatic one. All of them are depraved whack jobs. And you thought your family was f***ed up?
The Barkers are later joined by mentally unstable gunman Kevin (Dern, Coming Home) and prostitute Mona (Varsi, Compulsion). Herman is infatuated with the latter while the former is Fred’s lover. That doesn’t stop Ma from inviting him to share her bed. Trouble has a way of following the family wherever they go. At one point, they take a young woman hostage after Lloyd rapes her while stoned out of his mind. Not wanting to leave behind a living witness, Ma drowns her in the bathtub. Later on, they kidnap a prominent businessman (Hingle, Sudden Impact) and hold him for ransom. This is when the balance of power starts to change within the family unit.
Bloody Mama is something of an anomaly for Corman, a change of pace if you will. It’s not one of his usual no-budget quickies made to cash in on whatever genre happens to be trendy at the moment. He has serious aspirations with this one. He condemns rather than condones the criminal lifestyle. Ma and the gang aren’t in it for kicks and giggles. It’s a matter of Ma wanting her piece of the pie. She longs for the freedom that comes with being rich. She feels she deserves it and will stop at nothing to get it. If that means stealing and killing, then so be it. So what we’re looking at then is a searing indictment of the American Dream and how it only applies to the haves while the have-nots continually get passed over. I never knew Corman had a serious side.
Winters delivers a wonderfully unhinged performance as Ma Barker, a woman who has a strong matriarchal grip on her grown sons, lovingly bathing them one minute and slapping them around the next. She shows the full depth of her demented devotion to her boys with a rendition of the WWI anthem “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” just after they rid themselves of Lloyd’s rape victim. De Niro, in an early role, is eerily good as Lloyd, the son always trying to measure up to his brothers and always falling short. The drugs, which he hides in candy bar wrappers, make him unpredictable and therefore, dangerous. Stroud is positively scary as Herman, a violent psycho obsessed with looking into the eyes of potential victims to see if they’re like his father’s. Dern excels at playing unbalanced characters, just look at his filmography. He, of course, nails it here. Hingle, playing the most sympathetic character in the film, is terrific as the kidnap victim, a basically decent man who tries to connect with his captors.
It looks like Corman had a budget to work with on Bloody Mama. It is very period authentic with the vintage cars, clothes and impoverished settings. The action scenes are well mounted. The finale, a hail of bullets situation replete with blood splatter and a freeze frame final shot, is awesome. The violence is both shocking and horrific with moments like Herman slowly choking a guy by stepping on his neck. This film wallows in misery and sadism, but there’s a point to it. Although Bloody Mama is largely a fictional take on the Barker saga, it shows just how cruel and unheroic they really were. They did some reprehensible things like using a baby pig to lure an alligator to its death by machine gunfire. Cruelty to animals, that’s an instant turn off for me.
I can’t say that I enjoyed Bloody Mama. It’s often unpleasant in its centering on despicable, depraved characters without an ounce of decency. At the same time, it’s a fascinating film. These are terrible people who do terrible things, but you can’t look away no matter how hard you try. PLUS, it has a completely whacked-out Shelley Winters at the center. That alone makes it worth a watch.
