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Sin in the garden where "blood's thicker than water," the proper start for a fable about the end of all things. Ma Barker, dogpatch queen, Shelley Winters breathing fire with Bible and Tommy gun. Her brood is her pride, the firstborn (Don Stroud) rapes and kills and climbs into her bed, whimpering. Other sons include the weasel (Robert Walden) who finds his masochistic calling with the grinning cellmate (Bruce Dern), the fancy book-learnin' of the zealot (Clint Kimbrough) cannot compete with the debased ecstasy of the hophead (Robert De Niro). "I'm sure glad I didn't raise me any girls. Who knows how they'da turned out?" Newsreels give Aimee Semple McPherson and the Ku Klux Klan as two sides of the Depression coin, robbing banks and snuffing witnesses are familial specialties, vying with Dillinger for notoriety. Gospel singalongs, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" plus an original, "Murderin' Ma from Arkansas." "Ma, you are dark." A very heavy sledgehammer brought down on Bonnie and Clyde's lyricism, a gleeful liquidation of Roger Corman's morbid gangland themes from Machine-Gun Kelly to The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. (His distinctive ocular motif applies to the feeble patriarch's eyes, variously remembered with a Freudian twist.) The cheeky prostitute (Diane Varsi) drifts in and out, a flirtatious local (Pamela Dunlap) is fished out of the lake only to be drowned in a bathtub. "We don't have to pay no mind to those respectable, nice-people rules," the wall they hit is the kidnapped moneybags (Pat Hingle) who stands his ground. Shootout in gator country, with roadside picnickers for an eager audience. "Isn't this a dumb damn world?" Aldrich builds on it for his own Ozarks opera a year later, The Grissom Gang. With Alex Nicol, Michael Fox, and Scatman Crothers.
--- Fernando F. Croce |