Crazy Mama & Lady in Red [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Firstly this review is a very basic synopsis of the story so as not to spoil it. This film is not about the 30's gangster John Dillinger. It's about a young woman, Polly Franklin, who's bored with life on a farm run by a bible basher so she heads for the city. To pay her rent she gets a job as a seamstress. From there she takes a job in a dance hall where men pay to have dance with the women. She then winds up in prison run by a corrupt guard who gives Polly the option to shorten her sentence by working in a brothel where she will pay the guard a percentage of her earnings. Finally she becomes the girlfriend of John Dillinger. Note the product description on Amazon implies that she is his girlfriend for most of the film, not the case. Oh & it's called the Lady in Red because when she can afford it she buys a bright red dress, her favourite colour.One review suggests that Polly's life was mundane. This covers only a few years of her life in which time she spent time in prison, time as a prostitute & time as one of America's most wanted gangsters girlfriend!!The acting is top notch throughout, no "A" listers needed. Pamela Sue Martin is very believable in the role keeping it understated, a complete change from Nancy Drew as you will see in the scene when she first enters prison. The reproduction is reasonable considering the age of the film. I enjoyed it.

Double feature dvd on one disc,the first film is Crazy mama(1975) starring Cloris leachman as Melba who has had her beauty parlor repossessed & along with her mother(Ann sothern) & her pregnant daughter,decides to go on a cross country crime spree in order to buy back the family farm which was stolen from them when Melba was a young girl.Various other characters come along for the ride in this 50s set kitchy comedy but i really didnt care much for this film! I just didnt find anything that great about it,maybe i should have watched it before 'Lady in red',as after seeing that first this really didnt measure up.2 starsLady in red(1979)is the story of 1930s gangster John dillinger & his last girlfriend Polly franklin(Pamela sue martin).The film charts Pollys story from farm girl,to seamstress in a sweatshop,prison inmate,brothel worker,waitress & ultimately gangsters moll.Pamela sue martin steals the show,her performance as Polly is easily one of her greatest roles & this is one of her greatest movies! 4 stars

here`s a couple of double features worth a look,CRAZY MAMA must be the first film ever with a soundtrack so tinny I had to put the volume control down on my a/v amp to hear it right,other wise it was no good,ok gangster flick in the same vein as BIG BAD MAMA with the great Angie Dickinson,but not as funny,THE LADY IN RED is better and was hard to get until this release,better sound on this one but only mono,and a more serious movie,picture wise both movies are much better than any vhs copies out there,but not top end,if never seen before worth a one off view for each flick.

The Lady in Red - don't expect a roaring gangster movie about John Dillinger!Most of the movie looks at the fairly dull life of a woman who leaves home and ends up working in a brothel.Only in the last 15 mins does the movie really liven up, which is too little too late.If the story had included some life of Dillenger running parallel with her story, till they eventually meet up towards the end of the film, it would had been so much better.As is usual for many movies the DVD artwork is over-the-top and misleading, especially the image of the very slim female star! KAN

The quality of the tape was poor and several scenes were cut including the shower scene in the prison which features Pamela Sue Martin naked . There were a few good parts in the film but overall was dissapointed

"You'd be surprised, people stand in line for this kind of entertainment.""People stand in line for a lot of things these days."Coming at the very end of Roger Corman's female gangster cycle - indeed, this was the film whose poor box-office ended it - The Lady in Red is easily the best of the bunch and certainly a movie that deserves a lot more attention than it ever got. A large part of that is due to John Sayles' first produced screenplay from the days when he was earning his spurs in exploitation films. It certainly ticks all the exploitation boxes you can think of - shootouts, car chases, explosions, gratuitous nudity, women in prison and a cast of rising and fading character actors - but adds a surprising amount of substance to its print the legend take on John Dillinger's girlfriend whose red dress was to play such a prominent role in the Feds' killing of him at the Biograph Theater. As it follows Pamela Sue Martin's progress from farm girl, sweat shop laborer, dance hall hostess, jailbird, hooker at Louise Fletcher's brothel, waitress and girlfriend to Robert Conrad's movie fan, and eventually bank robber, a surprisingly vivid picture emerges of a world filled with misogyny, racism, violence and exploitation by those on both sides of the law, throwing in plenty of notorious names of the day like Elliot Nevis, Melvin Purvis and Jake Lingle whether they had anything to do with Dillinger or not: it may not be true to history, but it feels true to the period. Just as impressive is Lewis Teague's direction, which displays a polish, imagination and command of snappy pacing without losing sight of the characters that belies the low budget and brief shooting schedule.Interestingly it maintains a slight level of ambiguity about Robert Conrad's character, who never admits to being Dillinger and is never seen with a gun or committing a crime, the film even later mentioning the rumour that the FBI killed the wrong man. The killing itself is shot, appropriately enough, like a mob hit, the crowd excitedly dabbing their handkerchiefs in Dillinger's blood for souvenirs (one of many details Sayles drew from the facts even as he exaggerated the story). There's a very respectable supporting cast as well: Christopher Lloyd as a vicious mobster, an unbilled Robert Forster as a dapper hitman, Peter Hobbs channelling Walter Huston in a rehearsal for a bank robbery, the obligatory Dick Miller as the kind of employer who gets his girls pregnant, forces them to have an abortion and then fires them anyway, Mary Woronov as a gangster's moll and, best of all, Laurie Heinman as a Jewish union activist whose principles buy her a one-way ticket to prison. Although it got some positive critical attention before being forgotten in the wake of Sayles' later successes, the film never drew much of an audience, Corman even reissuing it with a more salacious marketing campaign and a new title, Guns, Sin and Bathtub Gin, to equally indifferent audience response before it briefly emerged on video as Touch Me and Die, but it's a nifty little gangster film that definitely deserves to be rediscovered.Shout Factory's DVD double-billing it with the dreary Crazy Mama certainly offers a good transfer that's sadly marred by a slight scratch throughout the last half hour but has a decent extras package, with two audio commentaries - an enthusiastic one from Teague and Forster and a particularly informative one from Sayles and producer Julie Corman, as well as two slightly misleading trailers from the film's two releases under different titles. As well as trailers for other Corman exploitation flicks of the day, there's also the option to watch it `grindhouse style' in a double bill with Crazy Mama with trailers.Quickly knocked out as a cheaper 50s set spin on Big Bad Mama and originally intended to be directed by Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Shirley Clarke before she was replaced shortly before filming by Jonathan Demme, Crazy Mama is an incredibly shoddily thrown together Roger Corman drive-in exploitation flick that gives no indication that anyone involved had any latent talent. Worse, it's not only surprisingly hard going despite a brief 80-minute running time, it's no fun at all. This time Cloris Leachman, pregnant daughter Linda Purl and her mother Ann Sothern are the ones on the crime spree to raise the money to buy back the family farm, with Stuart Whitman's Texas gambler and (we later discover) sheriff with a very rich wife, the redheaded sidekick from Happy Days, a biker and Merie Earle's little old lady aiding and abetting a series of clumsily staged and very badly directed and edited robberies at wedding chapels, dirt bike tracks and banks. There's an awful lot of screeching and bad acting, which seems the only reaction to a script that only seems to have been written after they've shot it (trust me, that makes sense if you see the film), ticking the usual exploitation boxes - the odd car crash, a bit of gratuitous nudity (provided by Ms Purl rather than Leachman), an explosion, the violent deaths of a few major characters - but never making it interesting or showing any imagination or particular competence behind the camera. Earle has a few decent moments and the eagle eyed might just be able to spot John Milius (who features more prominently in the trailer than he does in the film), Dennis Quaid and Bill Paxton among the bit players, but it's really not worth the effort. Lazy, clumsy stuff with only a decent selection of 50s hits on the soundtrack providing any relief from the tedium.There's another decent extras package, with audio commentary by Demme and Corman, a 14-minute interview with the two exchanging compliments that doesn't mention the film at all but spends more time talking about The Silence of the Lambs following the Corman movie model, trailer and two TV spots.

Classic gangster movie good action