Ma Barker looked nothing like Teressa Russel. Trivia says Kathy Bates was originally considered for the role. She would have been 110% better
shareI agree; Theresa Russell was completely miscast here, much too young and too much of a femme fatale to make her character believable.
shareI think this is at least the third version of this story, and I am inclined to agree that Teresa Russell was too young and pretty.
Another version (2nd?) of this story had Angie Dickinson in BIG BAD MAMA (1974), but the character names were not Barker, but Baxter, and Wilma McClatchie with two daughters. She was about 33 years old, and just starting her days in the POLICE WOMAN series on TV, and the fit still wasn't great, but better. Probably the most amusing part of that version was "the shat". William Shatner that is. And there was a sex scene with Shatner and Dickinson.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071216/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_50
BLOODY MAMA (1970) with Shelly Winters as Ma Barker may have been the first version of the story, and she was 50 years old at the time.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001859/?ref_=fn_nm_nm_6
Due to a local interest in bank robbers of that time period, I have watched those three stories.
There is an old bank building in the former "downtown" of a certain north Texas town that still has the bank vault and door in place, now used for other businesses, but still with about a 40-inch height difference from the street level to its sidewalk. The height difference is a leftover from the horse and buggy days when that was the appropriate height to step directly on a sidewalk, from out of a buggy or wagon. That was also when the streets were still dirt streets, dotted with horse droppings.
That was a bank back in the day of Bonnie and Clyde, and Ma Barker, and it was robbed by members of the Bonnie and Clyde gang, but it was before they actually joined Bonnie and Clyde.