Corman assembled the usual AIP cast of wannabes and has-beens, anchored by a few pros. This produced a family oddly mismatched in height, build and hair colour. Don Stroud, 190cm tall, an ex-surfer and nightclub bouncer, towered over Clint Kimbrough and Robert Walden, who played Arthur and Fred. In 1968 Stroud had been the heavy in Coogan’s Bluff opposite Clint Eastwood, but Kimbrough and Warden had almost no film experience, though Walden would later become familiar in TV series like Lou Grant.
To back them up, AIP veteran Bruce Dern played an invented character, Kevin Dirkman, while the part of Herman’s girlfriend Mona went unexpectedly to a classic Hollywood casualty, Diane Varsi. After an Oscar nomination in 1958 for her role as Lana Turner’s daughter in Peyton Place, Varsi’s career nose-dived when she broke her contract in 1959 and fled Hollywood, supposedly to ‘retire’ but actually to keep the illegitimate child she wasn’t prepared to abort or adopt. In 1969, she’d just returned to films and was taking any roles she could get.
Into this mix, Winters introduced her protégé, Bobby De Niro. Corman says he’d watched at least some of De Niro’s work before casting him, but it would hardly have mattered if he hadn’t. On paper, Winters and Stroud dominated the film. The remaining meat of the script went to Robert Walden’s Fred and his masochistic relationship with the bisexual sadist Dirkman, whom he meets in prison and brings home to join the gang, and to oust Herman as Ma’s lover. De Niro as Lloyd looked to be just along for the ride.
Having Shelley Winters in the cast inspired AIP to spend more money than usual. Most of the performers, including Winters, had Los Angeles homes and so didn’t need hotels, but De Niro was put up at the Beverly Hilton, a luxury he didn’t expect or demand; he’d have been just as happy in a tent. By then, however, Winters doted on her protégé no less than did Ma on her boys. ‘Bobby needs someone to watch over him,’ she announced. ‘He doesn’t even know enough to wear a coat in the winter time. When we did Bloody Mama, he didn’t even know how much they were paying him. I found out how little it was and insisted they at least give him some expense money. He was broke all the time, but wouldn’t take money from anybody. So I figured out ways of giving him money without him even knowing about it.’
‘Location shooting’ for AIP normally meant driving up to Vasquez Rocks with a box lunch, but Bloody Mama would be shot in Arkansas, and on a generous schedule, at least by AIP standards. ‘It was a four-week picture,’ Corman says, ‘and that was long for me. I don’t think I’d ever done one before that ever required more than a three-week shoot. But I had looked at the script and I said, “This is going to be very tough. We’re filming all over the state. We’re going to be in the Ozarks in northern Arkansas, then we’re going to be filming around Little Rock and various other places. I really need four weeks.” And they gave them to me.’
In deference to the Method-trained Winters, Walden and De Niro, Corman agreed to rehearse some scenes and even accept a little improvisation – a novelty for a film-maker who once shot an entire feature in one weekend. Mostly, however, Bloody Mama proceeded on the well-worn grooves of the gangster genre. Undeterred, De Niro researched his part with dedication. Arriving a few days early in Arkansas, he loitered round the locals until he learned their speech rhythms – learned them so well, in fact, that Corman suggested he coach the rest of the cast. That was a waste of time, since those who bothered with any accent chose the standard Southern drawl.
In response, and to make his character more memorable, De Niro adopted the most distinctive voice in the film, a murmured sing-song, shot through with echoes of a giggle that harmonised with the snatches of hymns he quotes. This, and an infantile innocence, would characterise his performance, as Shelley Winters discovered when she started the first scene, in which she has to give her boys a bath.
Seeing her hesitation, De Niro came over to her. ‘What’s the matter, Shelley?’
‘I’m upset because I have to bathe five grown men in this scene, and I don’t even know all of you.’
‘But Shelley,’ De Niro said dreamily, ‘we’re all your babies.’
Lloyd’s gentleness makes him unquestionably the most sinister of the Barker boys. Mona, Herman’s mistress, is ready to pleasure his brothers if that’s what he wants, but she draws the line at Lloyd. Watching her through a screen door as she strolls naked around the room, smoking a cigarette, an aggrieved Lloyd whines, ‘Everyone knows what she can do. She can do it even better than Ma.’
Piqued, Mona taunts, ‘You should try my pie crust, little boy. It would melt in your mouth.’
In the end, however, Lloyd prefers dope. Corman, who the year before directed The Trip, an apologia for LSD, not surprisingly drew Lloyd as a holy fool on a permanent high. There’s a goofy domesticity in the way he sniffs glue in the parlour, watched by an uncomprehending Ma (‘When you’re working on those model airplanes, you get to acting awful silly’). The first time we see him shooting up, he’s in the depths of shrubbery, Corman pulling back to show him framed by flowers. When he dies, it’s curled up, smiling and apparently asleep, in the plants at the edge of a lake – ‘Like Moses,’ says his brother.
Such religious references pepper Lloyd’s lines. When Rembrandt (Pamela Dunlap) swims up to him while he’s enjoying a high at the end of a pier, his feet with their two-toned shoes immersed in the water, he murmurs, ‘Jesus, lover of my soul!’ in surprise.
Even though it copies Clyde Barrow’s meditation on his sexual dysfunction from Bonnie and Clyde, the subsequent scene is one of De Niro’s best in the film. ‘Sometimes I can make it. Sometimes I can’t,’ Lloyd muses as he sprawls on top of the complaisant Rembrandt. ‘You can’t hit the jackpot every time.’ He confesses that ‘everything frightens me’, and shows her his needle-marked arms. Spooked, she tries to escape, but the rest of the family drag her inside, tie her to the bed and rape her, after which Herman and Ma drown her in the bath.
De Niro’s involvement in Bloody Mama has gathered an extensive mythology, with Winters the largest contributor. ‘I thought he was concentrating too much on externals,’ she has said. ‘I mean, the things he did to his body! He was a wizard, though. He can blush or turn white just like that! But he broke out in sores. He refused to eat, and drank only water. He must’ve lost thirty pounds. Just to look like an addict.’
Corman denies most of this. De Niro did diet, but not to excess, and indeed doesn’t look any thinner on film than Walden, Kimbrough or Dern. However, Corman confirms that, on location, De Niro, as he would do habitually for the rest of his career, remained in character as the perennially stoned Lloyd even after hours, and stayed largely aloof from the rest of the cast.
In particular, Winters’ description of filming Lloyd’s burial is cemented into the De Niro legend. ‘On the day we were to shoot the burial scene,’ she’s said, ‘I walked over to the open grave, looked down and got the shock of my life. “Bobby!” I screamed. “I don’t believe this! You get out of that grave this minute!” To see the character through to the end, he had actually got down into the pit and half covered himself with dirt so that his fellow actors would look down and get an honest reaction.’
This would not have been out of character for De Niro, but, unfortunately for Winters’ story, there is no burial in Bloody Mama, and no grave. De Niro agreed he did ‘play dead’ in one scene, but it was the one in which he’s found curled up in the grass.
‘I was just lying in that state, without getting up,’ he explained later. ‘It seemed like an easy thing to do and I wanted to help the actors, because once they saw me like that, they were forced to deal with it.’ Which they do, staring down at him, apparently asleep, then gradually coming to the understanding that Lloyd is dead – followed by the thought, ‘How do we tell Ma?’
This