Last year I read the words of the great Martin Scorsese about the "crucifixion" by a certain press of the movie "Mother!", one of the most different and interesting movies of 2017. Those words are a reflection of what happens in recent years in the increasingly decadent and uninteresting cinema (mostly) North American. I just saw this "boxcar bertha," Scorsese's second feature, one of three films I had not yet seen of this great filmmaker. It is a "pure" film, of great beauty, with evident (good) influences of the French "nouvelle vague". The film was made with little money and quickly, like almost all the films produced by Roger Corman. Despite this, Scorsese manages to build a beautiful and meaningful film. His personal brand is already evident in this film, anticipating its following "mean streets" and "taxi driver". It's a pity that in America movies like this, unfortunately, nowadays, they have no market anymore.

After working as an editor in the documentary "Woodstock", Scorsese was asked to make an exploitation film for Roger Corman, a known B-movie producer for the American International Picture.Set in the depression-era starring Barbara Hershey and David Carradine as the pair who led a small gang into a life of crime. It sometimes reminds us of the similar lovers/criminals-on-the-run classic five years ago when this film was released, Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde." Although it borrows some elements in similar films that preceded it, and was restricted by the nature of the film, still Scorsese made a way to imbued some of his style and energy and show us what he can do with the limited materials given to him.Shot in 24 days with little budget, "Boxcar Bertha" became Scorsese's training ground for making his future superior films – Scorsese once said that the tight scheduling of the film gave him the sense of discipline he needed.

It took me a very long time to finally watch BOXCAR BERTHA. The prime reason for this is simply because it's hard to find. I can't recall it ever being broadcast on television and I'm including obscure cable channels and not just network television. I can't recall it being available on DVD either or being shown in the filmhouse , Edinburgh's foremost art-house cinema. Strangely it is not held in high regard by people who have seen it and it's shocking to see it has an average rating of 6.1 on this site. If there's a film by Scorsese that can be described as "forgotten" this might just be it. How can a film by this great American auteur be forgotten ? Ah I can see why some people might hold it in relatively low regard. The 70s was a zenith for American film making and perhaps only classic Hollywood beats this era. This is an era where "movie brats" came along and made films about angry young people take on the world single handed and anyone who has ever been young and/or angry will recognise the wish fufillment that drives the central narrative of these movies. The downside is that BOXCAR BERTHA is drowned slightly by the films surrounding it. You're often reminded of similar films such as BONNIE AND CLYDE and BADLANDS. If there;s a difference it's that the characters are maybe a little bit too Robin Hood in that they'd never think of robbing the poor and that they're far more sinned against rather than sinners Some people have stated that it's more like a Corman movie than a Scorsese one. I can understand this complaint and it's obvious that the budget is limited but don't forget this is character driven which has always appealed to Marty and while there's lots of incident it doesn't really have much in the way of a core central plot, Can you see Scorsese making a film featuring a mindbending plot ala Christopher Nolan ? Me neither so this type of story is ready made for Scorsese. It's also far more enjoyable than much of Scorsese's latter output where he tries too hard such as GANGS OF NY or his spiritual movies like KUNDUN and SILENCE. In short BOXCAR BERTHA is a film for people who want to live fast and die young but never got round to it

Boxcar Bertha is an exciting, daring film set amidst a world falling apart at the very seams, a world in which four people come to lose all respect for law, order and others around them before beginning a spree of thieving and disturbing illegality. The film unfolds in the 1930s amidst Depression era America, with each of the four central characters that come to form the law-breaking quartet, of varying races; genders and classes so as to highlight an as broad-a sense as possible of whom exactly it is the nation's Depression is affecting. One of the members, and the only female one, is the titular harmonica playing Bertha (Hershey); somebody who must suffer the witnessing of her father's death by way of crop duster crash before going on to disturbingly fall in with the wrong crowd. It's established that her father may have been of a disciplinarian sort, a rail road worker commenting that her father wouldn't at all like it if he heard her using the profanities she does when he's up there – his death signals a systematic death of rules and regulations, an additional 'freedom' away from the straight and narrow after which all Hell in her life will break loose. The other predominant member of the troupe is the charismatic Bill Shelly (Carradine), a character we first observe giving a rousing speech to fellow rail road workers about a forming of a union, instilling certain degrees that the man is a leader and has skills in being able to talk to people, or rouse them.Following a run in with a gambler that ends in murder and the hitching up with African-American man Von Morton (Casey) as well as Northern state based businessman Rake Brown (Primus), who's come down with a false accent and an empty wallet to find work when they meet them in the same jail cell, the group go off on an ill-gotten venture of train robberies; law dodging and in the case of Bill and Bertha: sexual relations. The film is an early piece from American film-maker Martin Scorsese, a man who later made some of his best work in the form of exploring the worlds and minds of those either on the fringes of social order and in a state of marginalisation or the criminally infused who were morally vacant and at once so scummy and so putrid that to gaze on at their plights and actions was to do so with a grotesquely pleasing sense towards the craft but the polar opposite towards the people. In relation to this, Boxcar Bertha has more fun with showing characters of a policing sort, in the form of police troopers and so forth, to be of an evil; narrow minded or even racist ilk than it is concerned with trying to have us sympathise as much as possible with the leads and their narcissistic, criminal driven existence. Shelly's early talk from when we first see him has him speak of rising up against authoritarian figures, the company and the system and as the police net on that particular occasion closed in on the band of Unionists we see that the escapades he comes to engage in now is merely an extension of that mentality and that state of living. Shelly's linking up with Bertha in a romantic sense is dealt with amply and pleasingly done; as established, her own ideas or sense of operating under an authoritarian figure in her father whom we're led to assume did his best to keep her on the straight and narrow effectively has her 'rebel' against figures of that nature when he dies - in that there's nobody left with any rules to feed off of. Their connection is preordained by the nature of their attitudes towards these sorts of figures, with Bertha's in relation to her father coincidental as Shelly takes it upon him self to manifest a problem with whatever State figures see otherwise in reaction to his Union idea rallying call. Scorsese nicely documents the four of them banding together as a team, the odd leaf taken from Aurther Penn's book in that his film Bonnie and Clyde from a few years prior to this 1972 effort managed to explore what made the group of law-breaking, bank robbing bandits tick as human beings in between all the chaos, as the media demonised them, without ever really teetering over into glamorisation. A similar sense is applied here, four Robin Hoods robbing from the rich and keeping the loot for themselves set amidst barren, desert locales as a country and its economy come apart at the core with its rotten-minded and unlikeable police force following suit. Where cheap exploitation sprinkled with sex; violence and a simple enough premise complete with little in the way of plot appeared to be the aim starting out, Scorsese and the team appear to have elevated the material into something that stands up decades on as an exciting, angry piece teetering on the brink.