Big Bad Mama

Movies about fugitives from justice have long had an edge at the box office, promising ticket buyers the vicarious thrill of breaking all the rules and savoring the concomitant joys of lawlessness while living to tell the story. Criminality flourished in Hollywood at the dawn of the "talkies," which coincided with the Great Depression and Prohibition. As the Warner Brothers gangster classics yielded after World War II to "film noir," crime films became grounded more in psychology than current events and were threaded with cynical skeins of determinism and fate. The success of the Desilu television series The Untouchables (1959-1963) was responsible for a slew of gangster/mobster films that proliferated through the early 1960s and focused on the exploits of such florid public enemies as Al Capone, "Machine Gun" Kelly, "Ma" Barker," "Legs" Diamond, Bonnie Parker and "Mad Dog" Coll (among others). The allure of these subjects faded mid-decade, supplanted by youth pictures, Elvis vehicles, westerns and horror movies. The gangster/mobster subgenre returned with a vengeance following the release of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967). With the subsequent box office juggernaut that was Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and its first sequel, the dream architecture of Hollywood would be completely remapped, ushering in an era of experimentation, artistic license and increased permissiveness towards the depiction of sexuality and violence. All of which was very good for crime. B-movie director Roger Corman had proved himself a dab hand at the manufacture of gangster films with the back-to-back releases of his fictional I Mobster and his fact-based Machine-Gun Kelly (both 1958), the latter an early starring role for Charles Bronson. Corman's The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967) beat Bonnie and Clyde to the cinema by a month and a half in the "Summer of Love" and was a big money-maker for 20th Century Fox. Corman followed this with Bloody Mama (1970), a chronicle of the rise and fall of Midwest hellion Ma Barker starring Shelley Winters (who had spoofed the criminal previously as Ma Parker on a 1966 episode of the TV series Batman); it co-starred a young Robert De Niro as one of Ma's accomplice sons. That American International Pictures release was sufficiently profitable for Corman to consider a like-minded lady gangster follow-up for his New World Pictures. To take full advantage of the relaxation of censorship towards both nudity and violence, Corman and his Oxford-educated secretary Frances Doel hashed out a vague outline focused on the exploits of a more sexually alluring female criminal and her two nubile daughters. Written in a weekend, Doel's first draft was passed to screenwriter Bill Norton (who later directed the cult classic Cisco Pike [1972]) while Corman protégé Steve Carver was placed in the director's chair. Filmed in twenty-one days, Big Bad Mama has a loose-knit, improvised quality elevated somewhat by the celebrity casting of a pre-Police Woman Angie Dickinson and a post-Star Trek William Shatner. Rushed into production and shot on the fly with a minimum of resources, the film's capital asset is its sense of the absurd. Only superficially a gangster tale, Big Bad Mama has one foot in the exploitation subgenres of Southern farce and rural revenge, alongside Joseph Sargent's White Lightning (1973), Richard Compton's Macon County Line (1974) and Charles B. Pierce's Bootleggers (1974). If Big Bad Mama rarely rises above the level of slapstick, its characters possess disarming contradictions. Mama is depicted as no less motherly for being sexually voracious; juggling multiple partners, her sexual satisfaction is in proportion to her break with a hypocritical government. Shatner's Southern conman is an ineffectual tough guy but a passionate lover (Dickinson and Shatner's sex scenes made it into Playboy's "The Year in Sex" roundup), Tom Skerritt's bank robber is as humorous as he is psychotic, and Mama's daughters (Susan Sennett and Robbie Lee) are sexually active with no appreciable loss of sweetness. Forsaking Bonnie and Clyde's backbeat of sexual dysfunction, Big Bad Mama allows its protagonists to have it both ways until each must face his or her date with destiny. But even after being felled by bullets in the film's finale, Mama rose again for Big Bad Mama II (1987), proving if nothing else that Roger Corman has always understood "you gotta grasp the dynamics of money and keep the currency on the move." Producer: Roger Corman, Jon Davison, Teri Schwartz Director: Steve Carver Screenplay: William W. Norton, Frances Doel Cinematography: Bruce Logan Music: David Grisman Film Editing: Tina Hirsch Cast: Angie Dickinson (Wilma McClatchie), William Shatner (William J. Baxter), Tom Skerritt (Fred Diller), Susan Sennett (Billy Jean), Robbie Lee (Polly), Noble Willingham (Uncle Barney), Dick Miller (Bonney), Joan Prather (Jane Kingston), Royal Dano (Reverend Johnson), Sally Kirkland (Barney's woman). C-84m. by Richard Harland Smith