You probably won't believe how weird and trashy Martin Scorsese's second flick is.
Readers who've been following the column may have noticed a certain focus on the more testosterone-laden side of cinema. Put simply, I've written mainly about films starring (and aimed at) guys. But I cannot live on red meat alone, and neither should you.
If you’re in the mood to prove that a great director’s juvenilia is still better than most people’s best work: Boxcar Bertha (1972, Martin Scorsese):
After watching the Roger-Corman-produced "Boxcar Bertha", John Cassavetes famously told a young Scorsese that the latter had, “wasted a year of his life making a piece of shit,” and that he should make something more personal on the next go-around. That next work, of course, was "Mean Streets", but even if Scorsese hadn’t taken that advice to heart and stuck around in the ghettos of exploitation, I suspect he would still be talked about in some fashion. Much like Jonathan Demme’s Caged Heat, Bertha is a shining example of a talented director taking a punch-press assignment and crafting something unique and vital from it.
The base outline sounds like a "Bonnie and Clyde"-style genre riff: The title character (played with bubbly gusto by Barbara Hershey) meets and falls for pro-union agitator Big Bill Shelley (David Carradine), and a series of events see them teaming with nervous gambler Rake (Barry Primus) and taciturn black muscle Von (Bernie Casey) to knock over a number of railroad payroll deliveries, with the ultimate intention of putting the railroad out of business. While he delivers the expected quota of firearms and flesh, Scorsese finds himself far more interested in the atmosphere of the time and the way the characters interact with each other; as such, the narrative develops with an offhand, low-key sense of hang-out rhythm, with the big heist setpieces played for dry comedy or otherwise marginalized. Check that ending, too – Scorsese, ever the tortured Catholic, isn’t keen to let his characters or his audience off the hook for their baser desires. (Interesting to see Hershey here at the climax and reflect on her playing Mary Magdalene for Scorsese fifteen years later.) "Boxcar Bertha" is an unexpectedly observational piece, a film that shows us characters with a drive to live so that it genuinely stings when that drive gets thwarted. “Piece of shit” or not, it’s a corker of a drive-in subversion.
