Ma Barker Movies

As time passed, Kate “Ma” Barker became the inspiration for a number of Hollywood B-movies, including 1970’s “Bloody Mama,” starring a frumpy, cigar-chewing Shelley Winters and featuring a very young Robert de Niro as Lloyd Barker. It was soon followed by Roger Corman’s “Big Bad Mama,” a so-called “American action-crime-sexploitation comedy film” starring a svelte, often nude Angie Dickinson (Kate herself was short and corpulent), Sylvester Stallone’s kid brother Frank, and a pre-Captain-Kirk William Shatner. And most recently, there was the Theresa Russell vehicle, “Public Enemies,” which one reviewer described as “jaw- droppingly awful.”