Richard Crouse

Once again, we’re hugely honoured to have Canadian film critic, television and radio personality and author Richard Crouse join us, this time as part of our Tainted Love February. Richard, whose great new book Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of The Devils is available from our good friends at ECW Press, chose to highlight the legendary Roger Corman’s film Bloody Mama. Take it away, Richard!

Despite the disclaimer “Any similarity to Kate Barker and her sons is intentional,” the screenplay of Roger Corman’s twisted crime epic Bloody Mama is steeped in violent underworld fantasy that was more inspired by the success of Bonnie and Clyde than any connection to Barker’s reality. Corman, hoping to cash in on the wave of popularity generated by the Warren Beatty / Faye Dunaway outing quickly slapped together an exploitation film to take advantage of the public’s newfound interest in depression era hoodlums.

Working with screenwriter Robert Thom, Corman crafted a story that took the basic facts — Barker was the matriarch of a family of criminal sons — and injected hot button topics like drug addiction, homosexuality, incest and sadism to add spice. The result won’t win any awards for accuracy but it makes for one crazy cinematic ride.

The story is fairly simple, mostly made up of a series of vicious vignettes. Corman sets the tone right off the top with a prologue that sees Kate Barker as a child being raped by her brothers. “Blood’s thicker than water,” says her hillbilly father.

Then things really take a depraved turn.

The story jumps ahead to the depression years. Barker (Shelley Winters) has dumped her spineless husband and set off on a brutal crime rampage with her kids — the sadistic Herman (Don Stroud), ex-con Fred (Robert Walden), hophead Lloyd (Robert De Niro) and wallflower Arthur (Clint Kimbrough). They terrorize the countryside, robbing banks, kidnapping millionaires, machine-gunning an alligator named Old Joe to death and even stealing a pig!

The machine gun–toting Ma’s thirst for villainy is eclipsed only by her taste for kinky sex. She beds her own sons and even seduces Fred’s gay jailhouse lover (Bruce Dern). Ma’s sexual and criminal spree continues until the bullet-ridden final showdown when the gang faces off with police in a bloody gun battle.

The folks on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo look downright erudite compared to this bunch. Corman shines a light on the deviant and desperate behavior of these people, foreshadowing the kind of raw filmmaking favored by a future wave of directors like Quentin Tarantino whose powerful depictions of the criminal underbelly delight in pushing the boundaries of good taste. Corman’s portrayal of incest and drug addiction was unflinching and for the time, extreme. “Ma Barker made The Wild Angels and The Trip look about as menacing as fairy tales,” he wrote in his book How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime.

Corman shows a strong hand with his actors. Shelley Winters, the feisty method actor who once pulled out her two Best Supporting Actress Oscars from a bag during an audition and asked, “Do you still want me to read for this part?” brings her usual moxie to Ma, appearing to be on overdrive for the entire film. Her opening line at one of the bank robberies is a show stopper. “We’re going to play Simon Says, and this,” she says, holding up her Tommy gun, “is Simon.”

It’s entertaining stuff; she’s so over-the-top you fear that once she’s done chewing the scenery she might burst through the screen into the theater. Later in the film her manic reaction to the death of one of her sons — a churning vortex of jiggling flesh and shrieking —  has to be seen to be believed. In his book Corman said that Winters was “certainly unlike any actor I had worked with before.”

The rest of the cast are mostly b-movie regulars — Dern, Stroud, Kimbrough and Scatman Crothers — who all hand in journeyman work, but two other actors — one on the way down, the other on the ascent — really shine. Fifties ingénue Diane Varsi (best known for her Oscar nominated role in Peyton Place) as Mona Gibson, the hardened hooker “who can do it better than Ma” takes a role that requires little more than taking her shirt off and gives it some real personality. Any actor who can survive the line, “You should try my pie crust, little boy. It would melt in your mouth,” with any sort of dignity deserves recognition.

Robert De Niro, then an unknown actor with just four credits on his resume, throws himself into the role of Lloyd, a miserable junkie who resorts to sniffing glue when he can’t score any heroin. “When you’re working on those model airplanes you get to acting awfully silly,” says Ma.

“He stopped eating and lost weight as his addiction progressed,” said Winters, who recommended the young actor for the part. “We roughly shot in sequence. He consumed vitamins, water, fruit juices and a little bit of nourishment. He lost close to thirty pounds and took on the haggard, sickly look of a junkie.”

The extreme weight loss is a bit of a trick, but there’s more to his work here than starvation. De Niro spent time with the Arkansas locals, studying the way they spoke and moved to create a well-rounded character and move Lloyd beyond the hillbilly cliché favored by the other actors. On top of the accent he created a sing songy voice, punctuated with a giggle that gives vocal cadence to Lloyd’s naïve innocence.

In Bloody Mama Corman shed the shackles of good taste and shamelessly plays to the baser elements of the story. It horrified American critics at the time (although was better received in Europe), most of whom still had deep-rooted connections to the safe studio movies and were hopelessly out of step with youth culture. Bloody Mama must have seemed like Corman was flipping the bird to them, but Corman didn’t make movies for critics, he made them for the people who actually pay to go to the theater. He knew audiences wanted him to push the envelope and once again he was spot-on. Bloody Mama is great trashy fun which will appeal to fans of genre and b-movies. “It’s still one of my favorite films,” says Corman.