Boxcar Bertha: On-This-Day Thursday
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
Every Thursday, an older film released on this opening weekend years ago will be reviewed. They can be classics, or simply popular films that happened to be released to the world on the same date.
For June 14th, we are going to have a look at Boxcar Bertha.
We’ve covered Martin Scorsese on Films Fatale a number of times, and for good reason. We like the guy. Marty is one of the finest American filmmakers of all time, and is my personal favourite face that came out of the New Hollywood movement. It is worth going way back to see where all of this began. Today isn’t quite the day for Who’s That Knocking at My Door, since his second feature film Boxcar Bertha is the film that came out around this time forty nine years ago. With that in mind, it’s sometimes important to see a masterful filmmaker at their worst, and that’s what this opportunity today has granted us. Sure. Boxcar Bertha is better than what many directors could churn out when trying their best, but it’s still easily Marty’s lowest point. However, there is enough going on here that prove that he was destined for greatness, and that he had such a fascination with exploration.
It’s nearly impossible to not connect Boxcar Bertha with a similar New Hollywood film Bonnie and Clyde, especially because of the emphasis on rule breaking, violence, sex and robberies at the hands of lovers. The film is based on a literary character, but maybe a very young Scorsese took at least a bit of influence from the Arthur Penn classic, since Scorsese is known for putting his major influences on his sleeves. However, Bonnie and Clyde this is not. Whatever dares Penn took on for the betterment of his story and the evolution of Hollywood, Scorsese uses here to try and figure out what he wants to be like as a director. It’s some great soul searching, especially with the amateur techniques and experiments he accomplishes, but that doesn’t mean that the end result is going to be good. Boxcar Bertha feels a bit like a mess, and even its brisk hour-and-a-half runtime can’t curb whatever gaffs the film is littered with: wonky semblances, excessiveness, and a lack of fully formed structure. Each experiment works on their own, but they don’t do a damn thing to benefit one another.
While a nice look at what a young Martin Scorsese could pull off, Boxcar Bertha is still quite a mess of a film.
I was finding the film at least endearing at first, because it feels like a film student’s portfolio of discoveries (which it very much is, in a sense). However, get about forty minutes or so in, and that charm does wear off. It begins to feel a bit like an errand you want to finish, and yet now you’re stuck in rush hour traffic. Something okay now begins to feel painful. Nothing actually gets worse in Boxcar Bertha. I feel like watching individual scenes at any given point will allow you to have that attachment to young Marty’s decision making. Put everything together, however, and you begin to feel the exhaustion. Not much really works together. Experiencing everything one after the other can feel like a chore. A perspective of where it all began cannot save a picture from being a slog. However, Boxcar Bertha is a must for any Scorsese fan at least so you can see where his mind was at initially, and knowing how far he was about to go. Look at Mean Streets, and you have a spectacular crime film that got Marty exactly where he needed to be. Boxcar Bertha is like having a box of chocolates that are a little bit too old. It won’t be great, but you can sense what it was supposed to be like, and you’ll have an appreciation for that at least.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.