The Roger Corman formula — a saleable title and concept with violence or nudity every 15 pages of script — sang when the cult producer/director gave Martin Scorsese a shot at his first Hollywood feature with BOXCAR BERTHA (1972, TCM, Prime, Pluto). The film is alive with the director’s love of the sheer potential moviemaking offers. It’s a kinetic charmer that gave drive-in audience lots better than they could have expected from what AIP thought of as just a BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967) rip-off.
Based on anarchist Ben Reitman’s novel “Sister of the Road,” it follows the picaresque career of Bertha Thompson (Barbara Hershey), a woman orphaned in adolescence when a greedy landowner forces her aviator father to finish a crop-dusting run despite problems with the plane’s engine. As a young adult, she hooks up with union organizer David Carradine, New York con artist Barry Primus and her father’s mechanic (Bernie Casey) to take on the crooked railroad company as a band of itinerant train robbers. The company’s head (John Carradine) has more resources, of course, leading to some fiery and deadly confrontations.
Scorsese reworked an adaptation by soap opera mavens Joyce and John Corrington to create a film that uses the social issues of the Great Depression, particularly the fight against unionism, to comment on the commodification of American life. The band doesn’t just the railroad’s payroll department, the younger Carradine also forces the accountants to put an extra $10 in each pay envelope to make up for the company’s traditionally underpaying its workforce. Later, when Hershey is left on her own and forced to work in a brothel, she treats everything as a transaction. It costs two dollars to touch her above the waist, $10 below, and when a customer (Scorsese) asks to spend the night, so he won’t have to sleep alone, that’s an extra $15. You can also see early signs of Scorsese’s interests in religion (spoilers) and film history. There are two references to THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) and characters named M. Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
The action scenes, though expertly cut and shot, have a looseness about them. You get the sense that Hershey and her gang are improvising their criminal careers. That’s also reflected in the acting. Some of the scenes between Hershey and Carradine play like jazz riffs on romance. Scorsese knows how to use his stars for visual impact. Carradine’s lanky body calls up images of Abraham Lincoln and James Stewart, while Hershey is almost magical. Even when she’s dressed up in a stolen evening gown, she seems like a lost child. There’s also good work from Casey and Primus, and Scorsese deserves a special place in heaven (among the many others he’s earned) for giving John Carradine a real role at a time when he was mostly cast in low-budget stinkers. The actor repays him with a marvelously energetic take on the capitalist oppressor, as if the gambler he played in STAGECOACH (1939) had struck it rich and wasn’t about to let anyone else claim his pot.
