FIRST TIME AS COMEDY (9)

By: HILOBROW
May 22, 2024

Some years ago, HILOBROW friend Greg Rowland pointed out that the 1990 movie Dances With Wolves ought to be regarded as a sentimental remake of the 1970 revisionist Western Little Big Man. The series FIRST TIME AS COMEDY will offer additional examples of this recursive (and often, though not always middlebrow) syndrome.

MA PARKER vs. MA BARKER

In October 1966, Shelley Winters appeared in two season-two episodes of the TV show Batman, playing Ma Parker — a villain loosely based on Kate “Ma” Barker, the mother of several criminals who ran the Barker–Karpis Gang during the 1930s’ “public enemy era” (she was killed by the FBI in 1935).

Winters is one of my favorite actors of the era. She dominates every scene in which she appears, even momentarily, from Lolita (1962), A Patch of Blue (1965, for which she won her second Academy Award), and Alfie (1966) to Harper (1966), Wild in the Streets (1968; I’ve written about this movie several times for HILOBROW), and of course The Poseidon Adventure (1972).

Like other celebrities who guest-starred as villains on Batman — Burgess Meredith, Cesar Romero, Jill St. John, Vincent Price, Liberace, Otto Preminger, Eartha Kitt, Zsa Zsa Gabor — Winters hams it up. But there’s a sinister undercurrent to her performance that makes it very memorable. As in Lolita and A Patch of Blue, she’s an abusive mother who resents her daughter for being young and attractive… she’s good at this!

It’s all quite farcical, of course. After operating in all the major cities in the United States, Ma Parker is headed to Gotham City. In fact, she’s already laid the groundwork in Gotham for a caper like no other. In the first episode, “The Greatest Mother of Them All,” however, it’s difficult to see why she’s considered a criminal mastermind.

One by one, Parker’s children — “Pretty Boy” (Richard Biheller), “Machine Gun” (Peter Brooks), “Mad Dog” (Michael Vandever), and “Legs” (Tisha Sterling) — are captured. Pretty Boy is left behind when Ma and others escape from their hideout; Machine Gun drops his violin case at the scene of a crime and doesn’t make it onto the getaway truck; Mad Dog is apprehended during the robbery of a drugstore. Once Robin figures out that Ma and her daughter, Legs, are holed up at an “Old Folks Home,” they too end up in the Gotham State Penitentiary. (Legs’ prison ID is 35-23-34.) Was it too easy?

It was! In fact, Ma Parker has been surreptitiously replacing the guards at the prison with her own henchmen. Meanwhile, another member of her gang installs a block of dynamite in the engine of the Batmobile, designed to explode when the car hits 60 MPH. Using the Gotham Pen as her base of operations, Ma Parker’s crime family and their associates will be able to come and go as they please — and no one will ever think to suspect them.

Fortunately, Batman never drives over 55 MPH — the legal speed limit. (As I’ve suggested elsewhere, the show doesn’t make fun of Batman so much as it does the squeaky-clean Fifties Batman.) When he and Robin head back to the Gothan Pen to confront Ma Parker, though, they’re captured and secured in electric chairs. Legs is detailed to watch them fry… which is where the Shelly Winters effect kicks in. Because here, too, she is brutal in her treatment of her daughter — whom she keeps belittling, since women (she claims) aren’t any good at crime. Batman points this out to Legs, and in the ensuing confusion, he escapes.

Shelley’s Ma Parker does seem motherly, however. In fact, whenever she’s cornered by the law, she persuasively claims that she’s just trying to provide for her poor children. And then, when their defenses are down, she opens up with her M50 Madsen submachine gun — popular, at the time, with US Army Special Forces troops in Vietnam.

She even works her wiles on the Gotham Penitentiary warden.

BATMAN: You’re keeping Ma Parker and her daughter in the same cell block with the boys?

WARDEN: Uh, y-y-yes, i-i-it’s what I call my “family plan,” Batman. It’s my theory that the family that dorms together reforms together.

Sounds like Ma Parker talking. It’s this uncanny combination of emotional rawness and narcissistic venom that make Winters so utterly captivating. As mentioned, although the role is played for laughs here, there is a chilling undercurrent… Winters is entirely too persuasive in her Ma Parker role.

Before Alan Moore found inspiration for Watchmen in Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood’s parodic Superduperman comic, Roger Corman — one assumes — found inspiration for his 1970 low-budget crime movie Bloody Mama in the “Ma Parker” episodes of Batman.

See the movie’s tagline, for instance: “The family that slays together, stays together.” It’s a cynical twist on the Gotham Pen warden’s liberal bromide: “The family that dorms together reforms together.”

Bloody Mama, also loosely based on the true story of Ma Barker and her family gang, is here depicted as a corrupt, mentally disturbed mother who encourages and organizes the criminality of her four adult sons. Haunted by the incestuous sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of her father and brothers as a child, she seduces and abuses her own sons — Arthur (Clint Kimbrough), Herman (Don Stroud), Fred (Robert Walden), and Lloyd (Robert De Niro) — in turn, eventually leading them on a robbery-murder spree.

The gang is joined by Mona Gibson (Diane Varsi, of Wild in the Streets), the local prostitute. And by Kevin Dirkman (Bruce Dern), who becomes Fred’s lover, as well as Ma’s.

MA BARKER: [opens door and walks into boys’ room, where Fred and Kevin are lying in bed together] I don’t wanna sleep alone tonight.

FRED: Ma, I can’t.

MA BARKER: Freddie, I don’t want to cuddle with you tonight, baby. Kevin, I want you.

DIRKMAN: Well, we’re all feeling kinda weird tonight, Ma.

MA BARKER: …Kevin, I’ve been promising myself you for a long time, and I want you tonight

DIRKMAN: Well, honey, I’m ready.

It’s a satirical movie, in a way — insofar as it’s a sleazy, low-budget exploitation film seeking to capitalize on the popularity of Bonnie and Clyde. But it’s not intended to make you laugh. Peter Schjeldahl, writing for The New York Times, described Bloody Mama as a “low budget, unpretentious, extraordinarily brutal little movie about the pathology of ‘senseless’ murder.” Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, however, panned the movie, calling it “92 minutes of sado-masochism, incest, satyrism and voyeurism woven into a disgraceful screenplay.” Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin split the difference, calling the movie “a piece of pop art from which you emerge feeling depressed, degraded, and diminished.”

At the movie’s climax, a contingent of FBI agents and local police arrive at the Barkers’ hideout and a huge shootout ensues. Kevin, Fred, and Arthur are all killed (along with many officers), and Herman commits suicide. Ma is the last one to fall, firing her Thompson submachine gun at the police, screaming in rage and anguish at the death of her children — whom she loved, in her way. It’s beautifully choreographed and filmed — hence the “pop art” stuff.

It’s dark! The film was rejected for a UK cinema certificate by the BBFC, then released 8 months later with cuts to nudity, violent beatings, a rape scene, Lloyd’s injection scenes, and a couple of the more violent deaths.

Like Alan Moore, whose Watchmen is also replete with nudity, violence, and twisted motivations, Roger Corman is a high-lowbrow type. Here he brilliantly demonstrates the possibilities of a first-time-as-comedy work.

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FIRST TIME AS COMEDY (9)

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