atlasmb The title role in "Boxcar Bertha" is played by Barbara Hershey who, at the time, was in a relationship with her costar, David Carradine (Big Bill Shelly). This work of fiction concerns the Depression-era South and a group of individuals who were victimized by poverty and racism.Still, one cannot lose sight of the fact that it is a B-grade exploitation film, filled with graphic violence, gratuitous nudity, and glamorized gore. Young director Martin Scorsese gives the film plenty of visual style, but it only serves to glorify the baser elements of the story. Students of his career and his filmic methods can appreciate the variety of shots that populate the film, but it mostly serves as a baseline against which to compare his later efforts.The film has been compared to "Bonnie and Clyde" for good reasons, but Scorsese is hamstrung with budgetary restraints and orders to include more nudity and blood--titillation to appease audiences at the local drive in theater, where it makes a perfect second billing. Any point of view that "Boxcar Bertha" might have conveyed is undermined by contradictory scenes and pointless pandering to lower appetites.

JasparLamarCrabb This early Martin Scorsese film is more Roger Corman exploitation than anything we'd see later on from Scorsese. It's a well-made, expertly acted rift on BONNIE & CLYDE featuring the great Barbara Hershey in the title role. Bertha is a poor country girl who gets mixed up with union leaders and con-men, bank robbery and murder. The film is a successful mixture of comedy and extreme violence with Hershey giving an excellent performance. David Carradine, Barry Primus and Bernie Casey are in the supporting cast. Primus is a standout as a yankee grifter stuck in the deep south. The film is short (under 90 minutes) and hits the ground running, rarely letting up.

ElMaruecan82 I would love to say that there's a lot in "Boxcar Bertha" that foreshadows the birth of a new talent for American Cinema, that it carries many aspects that would define Scorsese's style, I would love to but I won't do that.I won't not because it's not true, Martin Scorsese's directing is the obvious highlight of the film and what elevates to a level slightly higher than all the other 70's exploitation movies, still, even admitting this would be unfair because it wouldn't take into consideration the chronological context of the film's making. 1972, we're at the pinnacle of the New Hollywood period, the same year "The Godfather" would open the door for the coming blockbusters' era, so when Scorsese made the film, he was only one among many other growing talents of his generation: Sam Peckinpah, Hal Ashby, Dennis Hopper or Arthur Penn. Speaking of Penn, the story is adapted from the autobiography of Boxcar Bertha, a folk local outlaw who was associated with a gang of train robbers in the tumultuous 'Great Depression' days. On that aspect, the film immediately reminds of the much more acclaimed "Bonnie and Clyde", a landmark in the portrayal of modern violence in Cinema. At least Scorsese's second feature film is just the proof that his talent could match more experimented directors, but as far as directing, editing, and bold depiction of sex and violence were concerned, it was nothing new, not even for that time. However, it does have a little something that is waiting to explode, and that will, one year later, with Marty's first masterpiece "Mean Streets". So whatever superlatives can't be said about "Boxcar Bertha", they definitely apply to "Mean Streets". But let's get back to "Boxcar Bertha" since this is what the review is about. The little something I was mentioning was a soul inside the characters, they're not here to appeal to us, but we're supposed to understand the soul behind the actions. They're all outlaws but for once, no one seems to lead the gang, and they're all following what seem to be impulses, pride, love and loyalty, with a romance in the core. Bertha is a young, sweet and innocent girl who discovered love at the same time as violence when her father accidentally dies in a plane accident caused by his boss' stubbornness. And she falls in love with Big Bill Shelley, David Carradine, an idealistic union leader, labeled as a Bolshevik by the railroad baron, Buckram Sartoris, played by no one else than Carradine Sr., John.What follows is the expression of a necessary refusal for subordination in a society dictated by dangerous and heartless rules. Bill and his friend, a black worker named Von Morton, played by Bernie Casey engage in a fight that sets the overall mood of the film, and Bertha's rebellious conscience. Barbara Hershey gives an incredible sweetness to a character that follows her heart, through Bill. She meets in her route; a Yankee rookie named Rake Brown, played by the blue-eyed Barry Primus. Bertha helps him to improve his accent to make it in the hostile South. The man seems to have a certain talent for making enemies and a strange reluctance for fighting, so the inevitable happens. After an accidental shooting where he's saved by the sweet Bertha, they join Bill and Von. The gang is finally constituted.They rob trains, they are criminals but they don't see themselves so, because they're against a dictatorial management that happens to be the real criminal, incarnated by the faces of the two McYvers, killers hired to arrest the gang. Victor Argo and Davis Osterhout with his scary Hitler-like mustache are the kinds of faces that are impossible to root for. But the film doesn't manipulate us into this or these feelings, Scorsese's directing has a way to portray the Great Depression as a moment in American History where the country lost all its boundaries, and when life was also a matter of survival and dignity, so, the line between crime and law, was sometimes imperceptible. And in the South, when the arm of the law could be very loose with the use of shotgun, we know, we're less invited to feel empathetic toward characters but just to follow their journey into a twisted world, where even being a whore was normal. No room for morality, yet, there is something in the heart of Boxcar Bertha that makes us feel for her, maybe it's her loyalty, her devotion to her love, and her ability to transcend the frontiers of the Law, just by love. But it's something more, it's a devouring passion that accepts all the sins of the word for principles, for a sort of cause that goes beyond rational. Bertha doesn't just give her heart, she also gives her flesh, her soul, her beautiful body, so shamelessly depicted by Scorsese's directing. And sometimes, we wonder through the film if this railroad that drives all the narrative will also be a railroad to redemption. "Boxcar Bertha" contains all the philosophical and personal material Marty would express in his filmography, but I guess all it needed was the setting: New York City and more expression of his own tormented soul, the reservoir of his creativity.I like to see "Boxcar Bertha" as the film with which Marty made his bones, tracing a clever parallel between the Great Depression and the gritty Nixon-era years, when disillusions, frustrations was the daily bread of some souls in quest of a meaning in their lives. Bertha incarnates somewhat the purity of a soul that didn't choose her fate, but made the best she could, according to what she believed in. That's the real passion and this is the film that allowed Marty to grow some confidence about his talent, and enrich American Cinema with his own passion.

johnnyboyz 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.