[Here’s another from my blog.]

I really don’t know what to make of Ma Barker’s Killer Brood (1960). Of course, it is a completely ahistorical gangster film – J. Edgar Hoover created the Ma Barker myth after the Feds shot her – but that is par for the course. (See Bryan Burrough’s superb book Public Enemies for the actuality.) Lurene Tuttle tears into the lead role with gusto, and Ron Foster is fine as Doc Barker – I had to see the movie as a Foster completist – but much of the other acting is extremely amateurish. The film proceeds by way of unconnected vignettes spanning many years, which I’m not sure works but is at least interesting. Way too many characters are introduced to make sense of in a 90-minute movie. The incidents depicted are often pretty lurid – suicide, immolation, Russian roulette, botched plastic surgery, etc – which might sound like pulpy fun, but the result is actually ugly-spirited, not something I’d care to watch again. (It was denied a UK release by the censors there.) So overall, an intriguing footnote in the history of the gangster film, but a very mixed show.