This review is a part of my Bill Paxton Project, an attempt to watch and review every piece of film the man did during his lifetime.
Okay, let’s talk about Crazy Mama (1975). This film was directed by Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) and produced by Julie Corman, wife of the B-movie king Roger Corman. It follows up on earlier Corman films Bloody Mama and Big Bad Mama. It stars Cloris Leachman and Donny Most, and is the first on-screen appearance for actors Bill Paxton and Dennis Quaid.
The film opens with a brief scene in Jerusalem, Arkansas, in 1932, where the bank and the sheriff have come to foreclose on the Stokes’ family home. A shootout causes the death of the Stokes’ patriarch, leaving his wife and young daughter behind. We then jump time and location to 1958 California, where we catch up with the Stokes women: matriarch Sheba (Ann Southern, “My Mother The Car”), daughter Melba (Cloris Leachman, Young Frankenstein) and granddaughter Cheryl (Linda Purl, “Happy Days”, “The Office”). Cheryl discovers she is pregnant by her boyfriend Shawn, played by Donny Most (“Happy Days”). The three Stokes ladies are running a beauty parlor, and once again deeply in debt. The landlord, played by Jim Backus (“Gilligan’s Island”) in a fez, arrives to seize the property, and the ladies go crazy. They steal his car and go on the run.
The Stokes women decide to go collect enough money to buy back their farm in Jerusalem. They begin with Las Vegas, where they pick up a womanizing Texas sheriff named Jim Bob (Stuart Whitman, Night of the Lepus, “Superboy”) and an elderly gambler named Bertha (Merie Earle, “The Waltons”) to join their crew. Cheryl, the youngest Stokes, also picks up a second lover along the way, a greaser named “Snake” (Cloris Leachman’s son Bryan Englund). It’s fun watching Donny Most monologue through why the new threesome both bothers him and seems normal.
Eventually the group go on a crime spree, knocking over gas stations and a motorcycle race, before Jim Bob decided to fake his own kidnapping to get ransom money from the rich wife he abandoned in Texas. The ransom drop goes wrong, and both Jim Bob and Bertha are killed by police. The rest of the family makes it to Jerusalem, only to find their old family home converted into a country club, where the son of the banker who foreclosed on them is getting married. Mama Sheba dies in a shootout in the country club. A year later, the ladies are back in California, still with Shawn and Snake, now running their own food stand. And once again, the landlord has come calling and their isn’t enough money. Roll credits.
The film is a rapid-fire hot mess, like making and serving dinner by stuffing all the ingredients in a cannon and firing it at the table. It isn’t anyone in particular’s fault. Demme came on late and hated the script, rewriting scenes as they shot. Production was hurried, and Julie Corman went into labor in the middle of the 3-week shoot. It’s got some charming scenes, but mostly either bogs down or moves too fast with little explanation – it never seems to find a comfortable groove.
As I said, this film marks the onscreen debuts for both Dennis Quaid and Bill Paxton. Quaid plays a bellhop in the hotel scene when Jim Bob gets kidnapped. He has no lines, just chews gum and looks shocked when the guns come out. Paxton plays a deputy cop, and gets two whole lines. You can see him briefly in the police car calling for backup.
