Reluctant outlaws in the American south circa the early 1930s steal whatever they can in order to survive The Great Depression. Also, a jaw-dropping young Barbara Hershey gets naked a lot. Roger Corman produces and that means sex and violence and tidy profits at the drive-in. It also often means a chance for a young director and in this case it was a kid from New York named Martin Scorsese.
Little of the craft that Scorsese perfected over the years makes it past this film’s low budget and tight schedule, but there are moments. There are few nice tracking shots down a hallway in one of the chase scenes, the opening credits montage is a fun homage to 30s films and the savage finale paints everything red in fine fashion. The big Scorsese signature moment though–his tortured Catholic sensibility aired out on Corman’s dime–is a wild CRUCIFIXION scene that comes out of nowhere.
Also, if you haven’t done your daily stretching excercises yet, you could maaaaaaybe read into this film an allegory about filmmaking.
David Carradine goes into the criminal life here, but he’s NOT a hardened crook. No, he’s a fiery advocate for labor unions. He’ll do anything for the cause, including incite violence. It ain’t the easiest life. He’s got powerful enemies (embodied by plush businessman John Carradine, who also happens to be David Carrdine’s real life father). He gets thrown in jail a lot. He also escapes a lot. The law is always after him. When he steals, he steals from the rich, but he’s never comfortable with it. He wishes that he didn’t have to do these things, but his fight for the working man keeps him going.
And THAT’S Scorsese here, too. He doesn’t want to make drive-in movies. He wants to make personal films. Like Carradine here though, he’s got to do this seedy work so he can eventually do his REAL work.
Scorsese first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, was a devastatingly personal film and it was great, but it didn’t set the world on fire. For a few years afterward, he made his living as a film editor while he struggled to finish a screenplay called Season of the Witch (later retitled Mean Streets). In the middle of that came this opportunity to direct a flick for Corman.
He took it and I think he did the best he could with what he was given.
Also, huge film buff Scorsese doubtlessly understood that lowdown genre films are how a lot of great directors start out. That’s how John Ford did it. That’s how Stanley Kubrick did it. That’s how Luchino Visconti did it.
Boxcar Bertha is brisk and entertaining, even if some of its fight scenes are on the clumsy side.
Still, Scorsese has told the story a million times about how John Cassavetes approached him after a screening of Boxcar Bertha and said “You just spent a year of of your life making a piece of shit. You’re better than that stuff. You don’t do that again.”