Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

Connianatu How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

Jakoba True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

FilmCriticLalitRao American film 'Boxcar Bertha' is remembered as acclaimed director Martin Scorsese's first true film.It was the film which gave the young American director the chance to pay his homage to numerous classics of American cinema.The credit for this film's success also goes to maverick American producer Roger Corman who gave complete artistic freedom to Scorsese albeit with certain 'artistic' conditions.It is rather funny to note that it was Roger Corman's idea to fill this violent,drama with nude scenes in order to make it more commercially viable ! Based on a true story which took place somewhere in a southern American state,Boxcar Bertha is a great historical document which recreates faithfully what depression did to ordinary Americans ? Tough qualities seen in this film such as anarchy, lawlessness and utter disregard for legal authorities are likely to induce viewers to compare it with 'Bonnie and Clyde'.Boxcar Bertha is a complete entertainer as its fast pace keeps viewers glued to their seats.Religious symbolism for which Scorsese was noted in the later part of his career can also be found in the final scene where the hero is crucified à la Jesus Christ.

Tom Gooderson-A'Court Martin Scorsese's second picture and the second in my Scorsese in Sequence feature is Boxcar Bertha. Bertha Thompson (Barbara Hershey) is a young woman whose father dies in an aircraft accident. With no money and no home she travels around the Depression hit South aboard railway boxcars. Along the way she meets 'Big' Bill Shelly (David Carradine), a Union Man and suspected Communist. The two of them begin a relationship and along with Yankee, Rake Brown (Barry Primus) and 'negro', Von Morton (Bernie Casey) take to robbing trains as a means of surviving.This is unlike most other Scorsese films. It is the only one to feature a woman in the central role and one of only a handful set outside of the East Coast. As a result it feels amongst the least Scorsese-esque of his films. The direction is fairly straightforward. There are no trademark long tracking shots, very little popular music and cutting is slow and traditional. One area in which Scorsese does stick to type is with Bertha's moral ambiguity. At the beginning she is a sweet young girl but towards the end she is a woman who will do anything it takes to survive and appears to enjoy the wilder side of life. The film also contains Scorsese's trademark violence, especially in an unexpectedly brutal final scene.The story isn't very interesting, or at least it didn't interest me. Although Bertha was the central character, I never felt that we really got to know her. Barbara Hershey's performance though was excellent. She had this mischievous glint in her eye and a cheeky smile. She is the sort of character that you could imagine getting away with anything. David Carradine (Hershey's real life partner at the time) is also good and the relationship between the two feels realistic, helped I'm sure by their off screen romance. One of my main problems with the film was that it felt like I was watching people from the 1970s doing impressions of people from the 30s. The period detail was there but it wasn't well used. Hershey for instance looked like she'd just arrived from Woodstock. Another problem was that towards the end of the film only Carradine's character appeared to have aged and this made me confused as to how much time had lapsed.Where the film is strong is in its depiction of harsh conditions during the depression. It shows this not only in the traditional sense of men out of work but also from the perspective of woman and African Americans. It is shocking to hear the black character repeatedly mentioned as an afterthought by the authorities, as though he was of no importance while the things that Bertha must do to live once her robbing days are over are typical of the era. There are small details such a dirt under the character's nails which helps to create the down and out look.Produced by Roger Corman, the film was obviously intended for the exploitation market. While it does not fit into the B-Movie genre quite as easily as the likes of The Wasp Woman and Attack of the Crab Monsters, it was produced for just $600,000, features plenty of unnecessary nudity and feels cheap and rushed. This is a film in which Scorsese is still very much finding his feet. If I'm honest it feels like a step back from Who's That Knocking at My Door and Scorsese went back to that formula for his next film Mean Streets, but this film showed that Scorsese was capable of making a film out of his comfort zone, quickly and on a small budget. That being said, I'd only recommend it to Scorsese and Corman completists.www.attheback.blogspot.com

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.

drystyx This never was interesting. It was boring in the sixties, and boring today.It's another of the multitude of stories of self righteous crooks, the chief ones being an attractive couple and a token Negro. The token Negro was the mainstay of the sixties and seventies, serving only purpose, to be someone who said "yassah" to the self righteous white thugs.There's nothing exciting about this movie. There's also nothing that makes sense in this movie. Whatever the motivations are, whatever people are doing, no one knows and no one cares. It's all just a jumbled mess. A bunch of action scenes, lots of shotgun blasts, trains, skin, just for the sake of showing shotguns, trains, cars, and skin. None of it is plot related, but that's because there is no plot.There's nothing horrible about the movie, just nothing good. Just a waste of time.