Bloody Mama

Krwawa Mamuśka

Bloody Mama

Roger Corman’s legendary crime saga starring a young Robert De Niro

Kate “Ma” Barker draws her sons into a brutal crime spree across the American South. Family ties become entangled with violence, crime and madness. Roger Corman brings the story of the Barker gang to the screen in an uncompromising crime film laced with dark humour. A young Robert De Niro appears in one of the roles.

Kate “Ma” Barker has had enough of scraping by. During the Great Depression, she embarks on a crime spree across the American South, recruiting her four sons for an adventure steeped in violence. Herman is sadistic and dangerously attached to his mother; Fred returns from prison with a new companion, Kevin; and Lloyd escapes reality through drugs. The most level-headed of the brothers, Arthur, tries to keep his distance from the family’s excesses, but in this family, common sense is not exactly encouraged. Bank robberies give way to kidnappings for ransom, and when the gang abducts a wealthy businessman, Ma must decide just how far she is willing to go in the name of family loyalty.

In “Bloody Mama”, Roger Corman takes the true story of the Ma Barker gang as his starting point and transforms it into a brutal, uncompromising crime film laced with dark humour. This is no tale of romantic outlaws with hearts in the right place, but of a family where love means control, violence and unquestioning obedience. Corman neither sanitises the horrors nor tries to excuse his characters. Instead, he serves up a criminal saga packed with violence, sexual obsessions and moral decay. The result is a bleak, grotesque portrait of an American family in which the saying “blood is thicker than water” takes on an especially literal meaning. “Bloody Mama” remains one of Corman’s most uncompromising films: brutal, provocative and entirely free of Hollywood gloss. It also belongs to the wave of violent, anti-establishment films that emerged around the turn of the 1970s, moving away from Hollywood’s myth of the noble gangster towards repellent, morally ambiguous protagonists.

Shelley Winters plays Ma Barker, delivering a performance that is at once domineering, terrifying and grotesque. She is joined by Bruce Dern as Kevin, Don Stroud as Herman, Robert Walden as Fred, Clint Kimbrough as Arthur, and a young Robert De Niro as the drug-addicted Lloyd. The film was directed and produced by Roger Corman, from a screenplay by Robert Thom, who developed the story in collaboration with Don Peters. John A. Alonzo’s cinematography and Eve Newman’s editing give the film its raw, restless rhythm. Corman’s film foreshadowed the popularity of crime movies inspired by real-life atrocities and demonstrated how independent cinema could challenge American ideas about family, power and violence.