Perhaps Roger Corman's least enjoyable film (and I'm not alone - his biographer Mark McGee hates it, too). It's a genuinely unpleasant tale of some genuinely unpleasant people, lacking vigour, humour and taste. Shelley Winters is ideal in the title role, Ma Barker, and the cast is impressive - Bruce Dern, Robert de Niro, Don Stroud, Diane Varsi, Pat Hingle. The acting is fine. And so are the production values. But the story... Urgh! Or rather, as McGee has pointed out, it's a collection of incidents which apart from the beginning and end could be put in any order.
It starts with seven year old Ma Barker being raped by her brothers and fathers, then Ma Barker grows up to sleep with her sons, and one of them winds up in prison where he's raped by Bruce Dern, who becomes Winter's lover, and this really nice girl is attracted to de Niro and she ends up raped and killed (a really horrible scene). Around this point I realised I disliked every character and wished they'll all die horribly. They can't even argue "gee it was the depression" because the film clearly establishes the Barkers as dead beats before the depression. And Corman throws in footage of the Klan and police shooting strikebreakers. "ooh, who's to say who's the bigger criminals". Well, get stuffed, these guys are sadistic psychos and their company is enjoyable.
There is good exploitation and bad exploitation. There is some good exploitation here - Winters' barmstorming performance, the incest (hey, it's between consensual parties), Winters blasting away with a tommy gun, Diana Varsi having sex with one of the Barker boys in the backseat of a car while the other two watch (Varsi also goes topless but it's not a very good performance - I don't think it was a great loss to cinema when she went walkabout in the early 60s). But this film is mostly full of bad exploitation - humourless characters, rape, poor structure.
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