Popular culture has kept the rambunctious myth of gangland matriarch Kate "Ma" Barker alive and kicking. She has inspired novels, songs, a whole raft of criminal characters on the big and small screen (Ma Jarrett in the 1949 James Cagney movie White Heat, Theresa Russell's 1996 film Public Enemies and Ma Parker on Batman) and even in the funny pages (Ma Dalton in the Lucky Luke comic strip, Ma Beagle and the Beagle Boys characters in Scrooge McDuck), but in real life Ma Barker wasn't the criminal mastermind of popular legend.
According to one Barker clan member, "the old woman couldn't plan breakfast. We'd sit down to plan a bank job [and] she'd go in the other room and listen to Amos 'n Andy or hillbilly music on the radio." Luckily there's no rule that says movies have to stick to the facts, otherwise we wouldn't have Bloody Mama, Roger Corman's sordidly entertaining, but almost completely fictional account of her life. Despite the disclaimer "Any similarity to Kate Barker and her sons is intentional," the screenplay 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. "The words ‘exploitation films' have many meanings," Corman told me in 2003. "You could say almost every film ever made is an exploitation film because to me, you are taking the subject and exploiting it.You are investigating it, and on a commercial level, you are generally picking a subject that is of some excitement or of interest. For instance, it might be a horror film, it might be science-fiction film, it might be a murdermystery, it could be a comedy, it could be amusical . . . anything that you could use in the subject to exploit that subject to get an audience."
To this end Corman worked with screenwriter Robert Thom (the pen behind Wild in the Streets, Death Race 2000 and The Witch Who Came from the Sea) to craft 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), excon 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! 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 addition of Shelley Winters in the Tommy gun-toting title role convinced the film's producers, the notoriously tight-fisted American International Pictures, to lavish a longer production schedule than usual on Bloody Mama. "It was a four-week picture," Corman said, "and that was long for me. I don't think I'd ever done one before that ever required more than a three-week shoot. But I looked at the script and I said, ‘This is going to be very tough. We're filming all over the state. We're going to be in the Ozarks, in northern Arkansas, then we're going to be filming around Little Rock and various other places. I really need four weeks.' And they gave them to me."
Four weeks may have been a luxury for Corman, who once shot an entire movie in less than 24 hours, but it's still a pretty tight schedule to pump out a feature film, and it shows in the final product. Anachronisms - everything from television antennas, modern strip malls and bikini tan lines - stand out like sore thumbs in this 1930s piece, but Corman can be forgiven the time-period transgressions because of the great energy he brings to every frame. The movie zips along, the furious pace matched only by the outrageous conduct of this highly dysfunctional family. The folks on The Jerry Springer Show look downright tame 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".
Corman shows a strong hand with his actors. Shelley Winters, the feisty method actor, 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 showstopper. "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 writings Corman said thatWinters 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 ingenue Diane Varsi (best known for her Oscarnominated role in Peyton Place) as Mona Gibson, the hardened hooker "who can do it better thanMa," takes a role that requires little more than taking her shirt off and gives it some real personality. Any actor who can deliver 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 resumé, 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. "For his part, he's reversed what he did later as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull and Al Capone in The Untouchables," saidWinters, who recommended the young actor for the part. "He stopped eating and lost weight as his addiction progressed. 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 raise Lloyd beyond the hillbilly cliché favored by the other actors. On top of the accent he created a singsongy voice, punctuated with a giggle that gives vocal cadence to Lloyd's naive innocence. The role of Lloyd Barker didn't make De Niro a star, but it is a strong performance that hints at the greatness to come. In Bloody Mama Corman sheds 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 paid to go to the theater. He knew audiences wanted him to push the envelope and once again he was spot-on. Audiences flocked to the story of Ma Barker and the movies it inspired such as Big Bad Mama, Crazy Mama and Boxcar Bertha. BloodyMama is great trashy fun that will appeal to fans of genre and B-movies. "It's still one of my favorite films," says Corman.
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