Big Bad Mama

Er, once again not quite

I was browsing through one of the streaming services on my Roku box, and it recommended to me a movie that I had never heard of before: Big Bad Mama. But the plot sounded like it could be fun, reminiscent of the Shelley Winters vehicle Bloody Mama, and the cast was also intriguing. So I sat down to watch it.

The movie starts off in small-town Texas in 1932, which as you can guess is the middle of the Great Depression, and also around the time when Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow first started robbing banks together with the rest of their gang. Wilma McClatchie (Angie Dickinson) is a single mother raising two daughters, Billie Jean and Polly, and more or less living off what she can make working with her lover Barney who is a bootlegger. Wilma wants more for her daughters, however, to the point that she breaks up the wedding of one of them who is would in Wilma's view be sentenced to a life of poverty.

Unfortunately, since they work with a bootlegger, it means repeated chases with the police. Eventually, the police get Barney, although at least they don't get the booze as well. This gives Wilma the idea of doing Barney's delivery routes and keeping whatever money Barney would have earned for herself and the two daughters. The cops, however, cotton on to this and confiscate all of Wilma's money in exchange for keeping her and the daughters out of jail.

Wilma has to resort to other schemes, and when she tries passing phony checks, she runs into Fred Diller (Tom Skerritt). He's a bank robber, and it's only natural that the two crooks start working together. Never mind that it cuts overhead. Wilma and Fred fall in love, although as the movie progesses the two daughters also reveal their rapacious sexual desires.

And then during another con job they run into crooked gambler William Baxter (William Shatner), and he joins their crime spree. However, having two grown men put togther with one mature nubile woman and two other nubile people who are technically adult women but not that mature causes all sorts of tensions. Worse is that one of their cons involves kidnapping, which causes much more serious problems.

If you were just to look at it objectively, you'd have to admit that it's not a notably good movie. There seems to be more sex than plot, and the acting isn't always top notch by a country mile. It has the definite vibe of being produced for the drive-in crowd, although apparently it was a September release and not in the summer. In any case, although the movie isn't particularly good it's enormously entertaining if you're in the right sort of mood for such a film especially if you want to watch with friends and yell at the screen.