Boxcar Bertha

MOVIE #1,520 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 04.08.24 𝑀𝒶𝓇𝓉𝓎: A MARTIN SCORSESE DIRECTOR FOCUS 🇮🇹🇺🇸 This is, I believe, the lone Roger Corman-Scorsese production and that alone makes it an interesting watch. There’s a night and day difference between this and the early, mostly student work. From the book Scorsese on Scorsese: [Marty] screened a rough cut of the film for John Cassavetes. Cassavetes took Scorsese into his office and told him, "Marty, you've just spent a whole year of your life making a piece of shit. It's a good picture, but you're better than the people who make this kind of movie. Don't get hooked into the exploitation market, just try and do something different."

This is essentially just the titular Bertha (Barbara Hershey) getting into kooky adventures against a vaguely political period piece backdrop, which I felt really worked. They could’ve called this Bertha and Three Stooges, as the men in their little gang each have very distinct personalities: David Carradine is communist wanderer (extremely similar to his Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory), Barry Primus is a wise-crackin’ New Yorker forced into the fish-out-of-water role in the deep south, and Bernie Casey is black. While this is definitely a beginning and much more connected to the aforementioned “exploitation market,” it’s still very much in tune with what Marty would make his entire career out of: complicated characters in worlds of violence. And to the latter point, this was actually much more violent than I anticipated: there’s a high body count and a bright red, almost samurai-style blood is used throughout.

The final thirty minutes play out like a prolonged denouement rather than a third act (this is something good to write, huh? I understand things, like cinema). But this isn't even really true, as Casey's cold-ass, kill ‘em all revenge is maybe the best part of the whole movie (even if it’s cheap and not set up very well). I appreciated this cheapness as far as the story goes, and it's a good-looking movie especially considering the sub-$1-million budget and typically fast Corman shooting schedule.

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Boxcar Bertha is a 1972 American romantic crime drama film directed by Martin Scorsese and produced by Roger Corman, from a screenplay by Joyce H. Corrington and John William Corrington. Made on a low budget, the film is a loose adaptation of Sister of the Road, a pseudo-autobiographical account of the fictional character Bertha Thompson. It was Scorsese's second feature film. It was released on June 14, 1972.