The per­verse delights of Jonathan Demme’s cult clas­sic Crazy Mama

“You ladies are dan­ger­ous. This is Amer­i­ca.” The speak­er is land­lord Mr Albert­son (Jim Backus), sur­prised, as he evicts Mel­ba Stokes (Cloris Leach­man) and her moth­er She­ba (Ann Soth­ern) for fail­ing to meet rent on their hair salon, that they are resist­ing his demands. This is Long Beach, Cal­i­for­nia, in 1958, and not the first time that the Stokes have had to face the Man.

Crazy Mama opens 26 years ear­li­er in Jerusalem, Arkansas 1932, with lit­tle girl Mel­ba (Dinah Englund) wit­ness­ing the local police con­fronting her father to seize his farm prop­er­ty, and shoot­ing him dead when he stands up to them. Mel­ba fled inter­state with her moth­er then, and is doing the same once more, back to her child­hood home along with both She­ba and her own teenaged daugh­ter Cheryl (Lin­da Purl) who is also now preg­nant with child.

In oth­er words, the dam­age done to this fam­i­ly has repeat­ed itself down the gen­er­a­tions, and will no doubt con­tin­ue to do so, in a patri­ar­chal Amer­i­ca where ladies are as much made dan­ger­ous as born that way. Much as the Stokes’ mod­est Amer­i­can dream – to own their own home, to run their own busi­ness – is thwart­ed every time they seem to be get­ting a foothold, so too in their strug­gles they con­tin­ue to flout estab­lished con­ven­tion and to oper­ate by their own rules, as both a crim­i­nal gang and a matri­ar­chal coun­ter­force (pass­ing their out­law ethos, and their sur­name, down from moth­er to daugh­ter). They not only snatch their seized goods back from Mr Albert­son, but steal his car and hit the road.

Deter­mined to raise enough mon­ey on the way to repur­chase their farm, they attract oth­er mis­fits to their increas­ing­ly ille­gal endeav­ours: Cheryl’s surfer boyfriend Shawn (Don Most) and his ​‘greas­er’ bik­er rival Snake (Bryan Englund), who are soon both in bed with the preg­nant, polyamorous girl who like her moth­er thinks of her baby as hav­ing mul­ti­ple fathers; octo­ge­nar­i­an Bertha (Merie Ear­le) who, hav­ing escaped the old people’s home where she was dumped by her fam­i­ly, is now liv­ing her best life; and Jim Bob (Stu­art Whit­man), a Tex­an who has unhap­pi­ly mar­ried rich but feels a deep affin­i­ty towards Melba.

“I can tell you right now, you’re not gonna beat the sys­tem,” Jim Bob tells Mel­ba at the Las Vegas casi­no where they first meet at a gam­bling table. ​“You can,” insists Mel­ba, ​“if you take ​’em by sur­prise. Hit where they don’t expect it.” She­ba agrees: ​“That’s how they keep get­ting us.” Yet in a nation of inequal­i­ty where women, the poor and the mar­gin­alised nev­er receive fair treat­ment, Jim Bob’s words will reecho, as Crazy Mama shows this extend­ed fam­i­ly of mis­fits trav­el­ling a doomed road, even as it lionis­es their efforts to go against the odds.

The Stokes are all at once society’s down­trod­den losers, and coun­ter­cul­tur­al heroes, reveal­ing – and revil­ing – an Amer­i­can dream slant­ed in favour of wealthy white men and turned sour for every­one else. At one point, when the fam­i­ly is in the process of being arrest­ed by a police­man, it is a Native-Amer­i­can stranger (an uncred­it­ed Will Samp­son) who inter­venes vio­lent­ly to help them out, in tac­it recog­ni­tion that there is an inter­sec­tion between the kinds of sys­temic oppres­sion that he and they suffer.

With its free­wheel­ing sex and vehic­u­lar chas­es, its rob­beries and shootouts, Crazy Mama is unques­tion­ably a Roger Cor­man pro­duc­tion, bare­ly con­ceal­ing its hick­sploita­tion and hagsploita­tion beneath the bon­net of a ram­bunc­tious road movie. Yet it is also very much a women’s pic­ture, bring­ing into focus the unequal oppor­tu­ni­ties avail­able to its female char­ac­ters. It would have been helmed by a woman too, but – in an iron­ic reflec­tion of the film’s themes – under­ground direc­tor Shirley Jack­son found her­self being fired by Cor­man over cre­ative dif­fer­ences ten days before shoot­ing was due to commence.

Clarke was replaced by Jonathan Demme, whose career began helm­ing exploita­tion pics for Cor­man like the women-in-prison film Caged Heat and Crazy Mama itself, before he went on to make his name with Some­thing Wild, The Silence of the Lambs and Rachel Get­ting Married.

In keep­ing with its title, Crazy Mama plays as an unhinged com­e­dy, but there is a rich seam of melan­choly off­set­ting the humour, as the film simul­ta­ne­ous­ly casts a nos­tal­gic eye back to the late Six­ties and the ear­ly Thir­ties, while bit­ter­ly observ­ing how his­to­ry either repeats or degrades. Final­ly back in her hal­lowed Jerusalem, the home­town that she has longed to revis­it for decades, She­ba dis­cov­ers a com­mu­ni­ty full of clos­ing-down sales and going-out-of-busi­ness signs, and remarks how it now looks no dif­fer­ent from the place that she has just fled. ​“Why the hell would any­one want to do a thing like that, change Jerusalem?” she asks. ​“It was a nice town.”

Mean­while, her beloved farm, long since annexed, appro­pri­at­ed and expand­ed, is now a lux­u­ry man­sion for the afflu­ent fam­i­ly that mur­dered her hus­band and kicked her out. This is a bleak vision of Amer­i­ca as a land­scape of end­less rap­ine and élite prof­it, with every­one else forced to eke out an infer­nal exis­tence amid ever-dimin­ish­ing returns and the con­stant threat of being down­sized again and moved on.

The Stokes may be thieves and delin­quents ever striv­ing – and fail­ing – to set­tle into more legit­i­mate busi­ness, but their crim­i­nal­i­ty only mir­rors the lar­ce­nous soci­ety around them, while their refusal, in all their pow­er­less­ness, to give in to the Man, to the sys­tem and to patri­archy itself makes them under­ground fem­i­nist icons. Although the screen­play was writ­ten by Robert Thom, the sto­ry came from Frances Doel, a Cor­man reg­u­lar who had pre­vi­ous­ly co-writ­ten Steve Carver’s sim­i­lar­ly themed and titled Big Bad Mama, and her sen­si­tiv­i­ty towards the film’s female char­ac­ters sur­vives the many exploita­tion ele­ments imposed upon them.

Crazy Mama also boasts the first, blink-or-you’ll-miss-them on-screen appear­ances of future film stars Den­nis Quaid and Bill Pax­ton (both uncred­it­ed), and a cameo (also uncred­it­ed) from writer/​director John Milius.

Crazy Mama is released on Blu-ray, 13 June, 2022, by 101 Films

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