Crashing cars, splatter guns, sex and nudity—whatever else about Roger Corman, he never made a boring movie, and this one seldom lets up. Take Wilma (Dickinson) and her two hormonal daughters. When they're not sticking a .45 in some moneyman's hapless face, they're stripping down for extra-curricular action. Lucky Skerritt and Shatner, except Skerritt's strictly low-class, while Shatner's a little short in the guts department. But Wilma's got high-class aspirations. So, being a hardscrabble, rural woman, she robs folks out in the open instead of behind boardroom doors.
But note the people she robs. All are pillars of what the counter-cultural 70's would call the "establishment". There's the huckstering preacher, the mortgage bankers, the boozy American Legion, and finally the wealthy snobs who think they are the "better people". In fact, their talk about not taxing the better people sounds almost contemporary. Note too that it's the high-class pretender Shatner who double-crosses the others. Yes indeed, screenwriter Norton may have been blacklisted in the 50's, but the political echoes continue
There's no room here for nuance or lengthy dialog. These folks don't waste time talking when there's another bank to rob or another car to crash. It's strictly the fast life for Wilma and her brood. Note how Mom sabotages daughter Polly's wedding, saying Polly'll only wind up on a poor farm with a bunch of skinny kids. That's probably some insight into those bank-robbing desperadoes of the Dust Bowl '30's. And so, America's back-handed liking for up-front outlaws like Wilma and Co. gets another jazzy installment.
