Bloody Mama. 1970. USA. Directed by Roger Corman. Screenplay by Robert Thom. With Shelley Winters, Pat Hingle, Bruce Dern, Robert De Niro, Robert Walden. World 4K digital restoration premiere. DCP courtesy Park Circus and Amazon MGM Studios. 90 min.
To Save and Project celebrates “the peculiar genius” of Roger Corman, “that Fellini of the ‘B’ thriller” (Peter Schjeldahl), with the world premiere of a new 4K digital restoration of Bloody Mama. Imagine Bonnie and Clyde shorn of its pretensions to French New Wave auteurism and you get Roger Corman’s unnervingly brilliant entertainment, which imagines Shelley Winters as the sexually ravenous, psychopathic Ma Barker leading her four sons—Bruce Dern, Robert De Niro, Don Stroud, and Robert Walden, each brutally unhinged in his own way—on a robbery, rape, kidnapping, and murder spree across the Deep South during the Great Depression. Critics were divided, to say the least, with some hurling words like “vile“ and “depressing,” and others recognizing in the sheer sleaze of it all—mothers bedding down with sons, old ladies thrown from speeding cars, girls drowned in bathtubs, and the like—the film’s grotesque Southern Gothic charms and its rootedness in the spectacle of violence and death so peculiar to the American imagination.
4K digital restoration by Amazon MGM Studios, carried out by illuminate based off the original 35mm negative.
Screening with trailers for The Intruder (1962), Caged Heat (1974), and Crazy Mama (1975).
35mm prints courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.