SATURDAY RUBRICS: 3/29/25
IT'S MOTHER'S DAY IN LONDON ON SUNDAY
BEFORE GOOGLE: Shelley Winters in Bloody Mama
J. Hoberman in The New York Times in 2014:
“Bonnie and Clyde” may not be the great Hollywood movie of the 1960s, but surely no movie released during that decade exerted a greater influence than the 1967 phenomenon that was Arthur Penn’s romantic, ultraviolent “new wave” gangster film.
In addition to polarizing audiences, largely along generational lines, “Bonnie and Clyde” inspired pop songs and clothing fashions, made (and unmade) critical careers and drove a stake through the heart of the expiring Production Code. The movie also demonstrated the use of popular culture to evoke a historical period (specifically the Great Depression), even as it spoke to its own moment and advanced a glamorous, newly relevant protagonist, namely the Righteous Outlaw. “Bonnie and Clyde” also made money, inspiring scores of subsequent movies, among them Roger Corman’s 1970 opus “Bloody Mama” (newly out in Blu-ray and DVD from Kino Lorber).
As “Bonnie and Clyde” mythologized the exploits of the bank-robbing couple Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, so “Bloody Mama” dramatized the rise and fall of another early 1930s criminal outfit, the Barker Gang. The Barkers had already been mythologized by the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, who promoted the legend that the gang, which included three brothers, was masterminded by their monstrous mother, Kate Barker, born Arizona Donnie Clark and best known as Ma.
American International Pictures, Hollywood’s leading purveyor of monster-beach-party-biker movies, announced “Bloody Mama” when “Bonnie and Clyde” was still riding high at the box office, then canceled it in deference to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. A year later, the movie went back into production with Shelley Winters, who played the memorably addled mother of the sinister pop star president in American International’s recent generational outrage, “Wild in the Streets.” Winters made a specialty of over-the-top matriarchs; “Bloody Mama” opened in New York in May 1970 (just before Mother’s Day) while the she was appearing on Broadway as the Marx Brothers’ mother in the short-lived musical “Minnie’s Boys.”
A quintessential American International production, “Bloody Mama” is as much comic horror film as gangster flick or youth-exploitation movie. Its aggressive tastelessness brings to mind contemporary independent shockers like the original “Night of the Living Dead” or John Waters’s “Multiple Maniacs” and, thanks to Winters’s performance, it also suggests the Hollywood cycle of movies in which middle-aged female stars play homicidal psychos. The world turns upside down; the sense of dissociation is massive.
While “Bonnie and Clyde” softened aspects of its original screenplay, namely a ménage a trois involving the title characters and their driver, known in the movie as C. W. Moss, “Bloody Mama” (from a screenplay by Robert Thom, who wrote “Wild in the Streets”) revels in pathology. A prologue shows Ma as a girl gang-raped by her older brothers, who are egged on by their father; the grown-up Ma, embodied by Winters with a sweaty ferocity, bathes and occasionally beds down with her adult boys, as well as with her ambisexual “adopted” son (Bruce Dern).
Sporting a crucifix; leading her brood in a hilariously inappropriate rendition of “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier”; invoking “God’s will” whenever convenient while articulating an alternate political worldview (America is supposedly “a free country,” but “unless you’re rich you ain’t free”), Ma is as much cult leader as mother hen. Her brood — which in addition to Mr. Dern’s character includes a murderous brute (Don Stroud), a hapless masochist (Robert Walden) and a glue-sniffing addict (Robert De Niro in an early role), as well as a hard-face young prostitute (Diane Varsi) — suggests a degenerate commune with delusions of grandeur. “You reckon Dillinger’s more famous than we are?” one Barker asks. “Or we’re more famous than Dillinger?”
The original print ads for “Bonnie and Clyde” employed the tag line, “They’re young ... they’re in love ... and they kill people.” Even more cynically, the studio placed a billboard on Hollywood Boulevard in early 1970, reading, “The family that slays together stays together! — Bloody Mama.” The movie was still in postproduction, but the sign appeared only weeks after Life magazine shocked Hollywood with a cover story on “The Love and Terror Cult” known as the Manson Family. Public outcry had the offending sign removed after four days.
Although “Bloody Mama” received mixed notices, The New York Times’s reviewer Howard Thompson wasn’t alone in deeming it preferable to “Bonnie and Clyde”: “Without the brilliantly artistic facade of the previous movie, ‘Bloody Mama’ happens to be more honest and less pretentious, with no grudging admiration for criminal ‘rebels.’ ” Mr. Corman took care to implicate the audience as well; the movie is punctuated by news photographs of lynchings and images of social unrest; the final massacre is witnessed, if not enjoyed, by a group of picnickers.
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Back in 1973, Guy Flatley wrote an article for The New York Times about Robert De Niro who was just becoming a star. Shelley Winters talked a lot about him in the story. An excerpt:
“Bobby is the next Brando!” bursts the bigger‐than‐life woman on the other end of the telephone. She should know: she's Shelley Winters, a long‐time fan and friend of both Marlon Brando and Bobby De Niro.
Bobby who? Bobby — or Robert—De Niro, the stunningly versatile young actor who has crashed through with a big bang in the two hit movies now showing, shoulder‐to‐shoulder, at Cinema I and II. In “Bang the Drum Slowly,” a disarmingly old‐fashioned laughterand‐tears tale, Bobby plays a crude‐but‐cuddlesome, tobacco‐spitting, Southern drawling, baseball player who is stricken with an incurable disease; in “Mean Streets,” a machine‐gun paced study of life and death in New York's Little Italy, he plays a chiseling, semimoronic punk who meets with a sudden, far from natural death. And the critics—from Pauline Kael to Vincent Canby—have gone bananas over Bobby, Newsweek's Arthur Cooper going so far as to say his performance in “Mean Streets” should be “preserved in a time capsule.”
So who the devil is Bobby De Niro and how come, all of a sudden, he's such a hotshot? To start with, there is nothing sudden about his triumph; he's been plugging away at stardom for 14 fritstrating years. But chances are you never heard of Bobby before—unless you're one of those intrepid souls who savor sitting all scrunchedup in some claustrophobic Off Off Broadway cellar. Or maybe you stumbled upon him in “Greetings” or “Hi, Mom!,” a pair of impudent, mini‐budget movies made by Brian De Palma in the late sixties.
Or perhaps you were among the privileged few to see Bobby as the psychopathic son of pistol‐packing Shelley Winters in a brazenly lurid flick called “Bloody Mama.” Or—if you were really on the ball — you may have glimpsed Bobby as the bisexual, spaced‐out hippie who shacks up with an aging, Oscar‐winning actress in “One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger,” the Off Broadway show which was supposed to skyrocket Shelley into the galaxy of great American playwrights back in 1970.
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“I'm Bobby's Italian mama,” Shelley insists over the phone. “Well ... maybe I am his Jewish mama, but if I am, he's my Jewish son. Bobby needs somebody to watch over him; he doesn't even wear a coat in the wintertime. Do you know that when we did ‘Bloody Mama’ down in the Ozarks, he had no idea of how much money he was getting? When I found out how little they were paying him, I demanded they give him, something for his expenses; at least. Bobby was broke, but of course he will never‐borrow, so you have to find ways of giving him money without letting him know you're giving it to him.”
Did Shelley also find a way of giving him more than motherly love?
There is a purr on the other end of the line which quickly swoops into a cackle. “Listen,” Shelley says, “let's put it this way—I had a bigger romance with Bobby than I did with any of my lovers. Better change that to read ‘any of my husbands.’ No, I guess lovers sounds all right.
“The truth is, I feel very close to Bobby—and don't you dare tell him I haven't seen ‘Bang the Drum Slowly’ yet. God forbid that you should miss seeing Bobby act! I was out in Hollywood some time ago and he called from New York, saying there was a screening of ‘Bang the Drum’ scheduled for that evening. The next day, he called to ask how I had liked it. I told him I hadn't seen it, because I had to be out of bed at 4:30 the next morning for some early shooting. Would you believe that Bobby hung up the phone on me?
“By the way, was Bobby's apartment clean when you interviewed him? It was? Then his girl friend must have cleaned it up for him. She's a beautiful girl, and just right for Bobby because she's not a professional and she allows him to concentrate on his work.”
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Shelley: “Bobby will never talk about what made him the way he is, but I suspect he must have been a lonely kid, that somewhere along the line he was brutalized.”
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Shelley: “A few weeks ago, Bobby's agent was looking frantically for him. I said, ‘Try Sicily,’ and sure enough, that's where Bobby was, studying for his role in ‘The Godfather, Part II.’”
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Shelley, who is undoubtedly the best all‐around Bobbywatcher, still has vivid memories of that time he traveled to the Ozarks to play one of her murderous brood in “Bloody Mama.” “I was very nervous just before we shot the first scene, so Bobby came over to me and said, ‘What's the matter, Shelley?’ I said, ‘I'm upset because have to bathe five grown men in this scene, and I don't even know all of you.’ ‘ Shelley,’ he said, quite seriously, ‘we're your babies.’ And, you know what? Bobby was right; they were my babies. I mean, you have a baby and you change his diaper and you don’t get embarrassed by it, right?
“Sometimes Bobby gives the impression that he's dumb, that his mind is wiped out, because he doesn't say anything. But behind those slit eyes, he's watching everything. He is definitely something new under the sun; I've never seen an actor do the kind of exploration, the minute research that he does for a role. He doesn't act; he becomes.
“He scares me. The things that he does with his body are truly frightening. He can blush or get white as a sheet in a second, and he could force his hair to curl on command if he wanted to. The character he was playing in ‘Bloody Mama’ was supposed to deteriorate physically, and Bobby got so frail that we all became alarmed. His face got this horrible chalky look and his skin broke out in disgusting sores. At night, we'd all go out to dinner and stuff ourselves and there Bobby would sit, drinking water. I don't think he ate a bite of food during the entire shooting of the movie. He must have lost at least 30 pounds.
“I tell you, Bobby gets to the kernel, the soul of a character and he refuses to let go. This is going to sound crazy, but ... Bobby got killed in ‘Bloody Mama,’ his part was over and he could have gone home. On the day we were to shoot the burial scene, I walked over to the open grave, looked down and got the shock of my life. ‘Bobby!,’ I screamed. ‘I don't believe this! You come out of that grave this minute!’”
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