Reeling Backward: "Big Bad Mama" (1974)

 

It isn't hard to glimpse the genealogy of "Big Bad Mama." Movies about rebels and outlaws were popular during the late 1960s and early '70s, especially if it was set in oldentimes to create some distance to comment on the ongoing political and social strife. "Bonnie and Clyde" was a critical and cultural hit, so we got a lot more similar films to follow in its wake.

It's the story of a tough, single-minded woman who goes on a cross-country crime spree with her two teenage daughters, along with a couple of hanger-on men in tow.

This was also a period where mainstream movies had very suddenly become much naughtier, with swearing, explicit violence and nudity virtually verboten just a few years earlier. "Mama" has a copious display of boobs and butts, including star Angie Dickinson. There was a brief era of "sexploitation" films before the advent of hardcore pornography into theaters, sort of a sweet appetizer before the less appetizing main course.

Excoriated at the time for lowering America's morals, these fleshy flicks seem almost quaint today.

I admit I was expecting a little more substance from the movie, even though I knew it came from the cheap oeuvre of schlock producer Roger Corman. It's basically just a repetitive string of various heists, which always end with Mama and her crew riding off in their car with a pile of cash, firing off a tommy gun to scare off pursuers as fast-paced banjo music plays, with sex scenes for the interludes between.

"Big Bad Mama" was essentially a remake of Corman's "Bloody Mama" from a few years earlier starring Shelley Winters. Whatever you want to say about him, Corman gave a lot of opportunities for youngsters like Ron Howard to make their first movies, or older waning stars to stay in the limelight. 

The movie also stars William Shatner during his wilderness years between the Star Trek TV show and movies, and a young Tom Skerritt. Sally Kirkland shows up in a brief bit role.

Dickinson, who'd seen her own luster fade after leading roles in the 1950s and '60s, rejuvenated her career with "Mama" turning her into a sex symbol in her 40s, going on to star in the hit TV show "Police Woman" and other projects. Little did I know, but Corman and Dickinson would reunite 13 years later for a prequel, which tells how Wilma McClatchie first lost her husband and farm, turning to a life of crime.

It's too bad "Mama" relies so much on skin and shootin', because there's the bones of a good story here. Wilma is a proto-feminist rebel, a woman who's lost everything and is determined to take it all back, and then some, on her own terms. She loves her two teenage daughters, and is happy to steal and kill to give them the finer things in life.

She's also unabashedly domineering, the boss of her criminal enterprise and her bedroom, too. She takes on a hot-tempered bank robber, Fred Diller (Skerritt), and makes him her plaything. But when a better prospect comes along in the form of a dashing gambler, (William J. Baxter), she switches sheets partners without even so much as a by-the-way conversation.

Later, after elder daughter Billy Jean (Susan Sennett) has taken on Diller as a lover and shared him with sister Polly (Robbie Lee), Wilma gives Baxter the boot and then promotes Diller back to the top spot. I imagine the idea of a mother and daughter bed-hopping with two different men seemed pretty scandalous when the movie came out.

The daughters are an interesting pair, and I wish the screenplay by William Norton (who also did "White Lightning") and Frances Doel had developed them a little more. Polly is childish and innocent, even carrying around a doll, though she's very curious about sex. As the movie open she's set to marry some country bumpkin, but Wilma blows up the ceremony because she doesn't want to see Polly consigned to a life of kitchen drudgery like she was.

Billy Jean is a little older and a little wiser, and definitely has some of her mother's steel in her spine. She has a penchant for teasing and playing jokes, and like Wilma she's definitely the alpha in her relationship with Diller. When Wilma claims him back, we can see the unspoken hurt in Billy Jean's eyes. 

They first get their start in crime by partnering with Uncle Barney (Willingham), a prospering moonshiner, though it's unclear if this is actually William's brother-in-law or the uncle appellation is just a familiar term for the girls. When he's killed by some lawmen, Wilma takes over his practice.

After being forced to pay off a fat, corrupt Southern sheriff -- is there any other kind in the movies? -- Wilma vows to always be the one taking cash, not handing it over, from now on.

They move on from one scheme to the next, Wilma careful never to repeat her M.O. They rip off a veterans reunion where Billy Jean and Polly had been recruited as strippers, using her false effrontery at a mother angry about having her (not so) innocent daughters despoiled to make off with a pile of cash. A shyster preacher preaching the good word so he can run away with the donation basket finds himself plucked and booted out of his own car.

One curious job has them robbing an oil drilling company -- I'm a little unclear why such an industrial operation would have large wads of money lying around. They pick up Baxter, a smooth Louisville operating currently experiencing "an embarrassment of funds," at a horse track they stick up. They also pass themselves off as high-society types so they can rob an entire party full of rich snobs.

This leads to Wilma's grandest scheme to kidnap a snooty heiress, Jane Kingston (Joan Prather), and ransom her for a cool million, which will set them up for life. It seems to be going well, until the ongoing enmity between Baxter and Diller boils over, and the girl seduces Diller and then gives him the slip, and Baxter lets her go. 

Eventually he brings the cops for ubiquitous final shoot-out where he, Diller and Wilma all wind up dead.

A pair of federal agents in black suits and a black car, with Dick Miller as the senior of the two, wind up as the comic relief, constantly being run off into ditches or dumped into a pile of horse manure. 

The three-way dynamic between Wilma and the two men is curious, mostly for the fact they defer to her in every way. Diller loathes the fancy-pants Baxter, hurling constant insults and insinuations about his sexuality, though the latter never responds beyond mortified shock at the rude manners. He finally challenges Diller to a fistfight, boasting that he was a college boxing champion, though Diller simply swings his long-barrelled pistol into review -- phallic taunts much? -- and Baxter backs down.

I think Wilma is congenitally more attuned to a simple, violent but authentic soul like Diller, though she sees Baxter as a more genteel sort better suited to her ambitions in life. Though she eventually sees through his conniving facade to the sniveling coward beneath.

Dickinson's sex scenes with Shatner are pretty loopy to watch, if only from a pop culture standpoint -- Captain Kirk in the buff! -- but also for their total lack of real lovemaking. Baxter caresses Wilma's body with itchy fingers and wide eyes, as if in awe of her beauty, more like Thorin fingering dragon's gold than a lusty beast sowing his seed. He is a man who covets, and once he has something, that want turns to something else. 

For her part, Wilma is the sort of woman who doesn't shy away from worship.

Once I got over the fact "Big Bad Mama" was meant to be a fun scamp rather than a gritty crime story, I settled back and enjoyed the ride. Director Steve Carver keeps things moving along at a brisk pace, though I quickly grew tired of David Grisman's cotton-picking music.

It's the rambling, rambunctious story of a powerful women who flexes her smarts and determination, uses men and tosses them aside as she pleases. Sure, she flaunts her body, because flaunting is just what she does.

Reeling Backward: "Rio Bravo" (1959)

One of the few things I disliked about studying cinema at New York University was the constant politicization of movies. As a student I was frequently bombarded with articles and professor lectures that shoehorned a political interpretation onto a movie that I didn't feel belonged there.

It wasn't just that these analyses nearly always came from a leftist perspective -- and by "nearly always," I mean 100% of the time -- while I swing to the right. It was the fact that films that were avowedly unpolitical still got this treatment. So you'd read something about action movies of the '80s and how they reflected a fascist, Reaganite mindset.

I thought it largely bull, and simply set most of it aside in my thinking about film.

It's hard not to place a political slant on 1959's "Rio Bravo," however, since John Wayne, director Howard Hawks and others involved in the production have explicitly described it as a conservative response to "High Noon," which they considered a bunch of pinko Hollywood claptrap.

Both films have a fairly similar plot, about a lone sheriff standing against a gang of outlaws coming to town. While Gary Cooper's lawman spent most of "High Noon" unsuccessfully trying to recruit local citizens to help him in the coming gunbattle, Wayne's John T. Chance conspicuously avoid asking for assistance. In fact, he gruffly turns down the offer of a blazingly fast gunslinger because the youngster had previously opted not to stick his nose in other people's business -- a move Chance himself had deemed most wise.

I don't think either film is overtly political, but you can read some things from an allegorical standpoint, particularly the individual's relationship to the larger community around him. Both men are respected for upholding the law, but when they become a target of the very forces they're meant to rein in, the townsfolk react in very different ways.

Cooper goes begging for help, and is ostracized. Chance makes it clear that he's willing to handle things more or less on his own, and is flooded with offers of assistance. Some, like Ricky Nelson as the confident whippersnapper Colorado Ryan, offer to help with their guns. Others, like Carlos the saloon owner (Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez) or rambling gambler Feathers (Angie Dickinson), come through with moral and logistical support.

For Feathers, that includes the proffering of herself as a sexual plaything for Chance to take or leave as he pleases. It's a strong, sensual turn by Dickinson as a woman who's empowered by her sexuality rather than burdened by it. She may use herself as a sex object, but it's her choice.

Dean Martin has one of his meatier film roles as Dude, Chance's former deputy who turned into a timid drunk after having his heart broken. He wandered back into town a couple of years ago, begging drinks wherever he can get them, even if it is a silver dollar thrown contemptuously into a spittoon by Joe Burdette, the local tough.

In the film's surprisingly dialogue-free opening sequence, Chance kicks the spittoon to keep Dude from debasing himself, and is rewarded by being knocked out cold with a chunk of wood swung from behind. This sets off a fight with Burdette, a bystander is shot and killed, and the rest of the movie is spent waiting for the U.S. marshall to come fetch Joe Burdette for trial, while his rich brother Nathan (John Russell) surrounds the jail with killers hired for a $50 gold coin apiece.

Much of the interaction between Chance and Dude involves the former tutoring the latter in the ways of manliness. At one later point, after Dude has sobered and taken up the badge again, another gunman repeats the dollar-in-the-spittoon joke. Dude, having successfully killed the man on the balcony who had the drop on him, is content to leave it at that, with his reputation restored. But Chance reminds him about the fellow throwing the coin, and Dude makes the man grovel for his impertinence.

Back at the jail is Stumpy, the cantankerous old deputy with a screechy voice and a hitch in his giddyup, played by the veteran character actor Walter Brennan. He's the sort of crusty-yet-sentimental creature who often populates the background of Westerns.

Longtime Wayne co-conspirator Ward Bond is around for a few minutes in the early going, as an old friend of Chance who is a little too vocal about the people needing to lend the sheriff a hand. For his trouble he's gunned down in the street by a Burdette assassin.

At nearly 2½ hours, "Rio Bravo" is notable for its languid pace without ever feeling like it's treading water. Screenwriters Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman delivered a comfortable, naturalistic script based on a short story by B.H. McCampbell.

There's a lot of scenes that basically consist of just a bunch of guys hanging around the jail, talking, drinking and even singing -- Martin and Nelson team up for a particularly pleasing rendition of "My Rifle, Pony and Me."

As much as I try, it's hard for me to dismiss -- or embrace -- "Rio Bravo" as a "conservative" Western. You could make the argument that the genre naturally lends itself to an emphasis on individualism, which is the historic domain of right-wing thinkers.

But even if John Wayne & Co. set out to make a conservative repudiation of "High Noon," it's difficult to see it as anything more than a well-made, engaging Western that stands sturdy on its own two boots -- politics be damned.