Cassavetes Was Wrong! Why ‘Boxcar Bertha’ Belongs in the Canon
Martin Scorsese's second feature, an exploitation picture made on assignment for drive-in mogul Roger Corman, has long been undervalued — a new 4K UHD edition celebrates it in the context of the director's body of work.
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Cassavetes Was Wrong! Why ‘Boxcar Bertha’ Belongs in the Canon
Martin Scorsese's second feature, an exploitation picture made on assignment for drive-in mogul Roger Corman, has long been undervalued — a new 4K UHD edition celebrates it in the context of the director's body of work.
By Jim Hemphill
[Image: Jim Hemphill]
#### Jim Hemphill
JimmyHemphill
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February 28, 2026 10:00 am
[Image: BOXCAR BERTHA, Barbara Hershey, 1972]
'Boxcar Bertha'
Courtesy Everett Collection
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In Rebecca Miller‘s superb recent documentary “Mr. Scorsese,” Martin Scorsese tells a story about his 1972 exploitation film “Boxcar Bertha” that has become a kind of universally accepted origin story for Scorsese’s birth as an artist. In the anecdote, Scorsese shows “Boxcar Bertha” — a sex-and-violence-fueled action movie he directed on assignment for producer Roger Corman — to his friend and mentor John Cassavetes.
“Marty,” Cassavetes says to his protégé, “you just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit.” According to Scorsese, Cassavetes’ insistence that he leave drive-in fare behind in favor of something more personal led the young filmmaker to write what would ultimately become “Mean Streets” instead of taking another job for Corman, directing the blaxploitation movie “I Escaped from Devil’s Island.”
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“Mean Streets,” of course, established Scorsese as one of the great New Hollywood filmmakers alongside Francis Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich (both of whom, like Scorsese, got their big breaks from Roger Corman) and began a career that would yield at least a dozen of the greatest American movies ever made. So if Scorsese’s account is true, we all owe John Cassavetes a huge debt of gratitude — even if his assessment of “Boxcar Bertha” was as incorrect and ignorant as it was impactful on the ambitions of its young director.
The fact is that “Boxcar Bertha” is not only not a “piece of shit,” and not merely a better-than-average drive-in movie that transcends its low-budget origins, but a legitimately great film that needs no apology or qualification. And while it plants many seeds that would grow and flourish in Scorsese masterpieces to come like “The Last Temptation of Christ” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” it’s more than just an apprentice work worth watching for what it has to tell us about its creator’s later achievements.
“Boxcar Bertha” stands on its own as a compelling piece of art, a politically charged product of its time with the timeless virtues of visual imagination, propulsive pace, and mythic grandeur — albeit a grandeur Scorsese had to strain for a bit on his B-movie schedule and budget. A new 4K UHD edition from the boutique Cinématographe label goes a long way toward recontextualizing a film that has often been criminally underrated, even by its own director; with its pristine transfer that showcases the gorgeous lighting by “Sorcerer” cinematographer John M. Stephens and its celebratory extra features, the Cinématographe disc places “Boxcar Bertha” in the New Hollywood pantheon where it has always belonged.
[Image: BOXCAR BERTHA, David Carradine, Barbara Hershey, 1972]
‘Boxcar Bertha’Courtesy Everett Collection
“Boxcar Bertha” began as a sort of unofficial sequel to “Bloody Mama,” a Depression-era gangster movie with a female protagonist (and a supporting role played by future Scorsese muse Robert De Niro) that Corman had directed in 1970. Although there was no direct narrative link between the two films, the story “Boxcar Bertha” told of a young transient (Barbara Hershey) who becomes partners in love and crime with an idealistic union organizer (David Carradine) shared and doubled down on the earlier movie’s combination of action, sex, leftist politics, and surprisingly convincing 1930s period flavor.
Although Scorsese was as associated with New York then as he would continue to be throughout his career, Corman hired him to direct the Arkansas-based “Bertha” based on the filmmaking prowess the director exhibited in his debut feature, the scrappy but brilliant “Who’s That Knocking At My Door.” That film was made in fits and starts over the course of several years, whenever Scorsese could scrounge up money and actors; “Boxcar Bertha” gave him his first shot at a movie with a professional schedule, cast, and crew, and he made the most of it.
“Boxcar Bertha” is both representative of Scorsese’s recurring preoccupations and a bit of an outlier, in some ways bringing up ideas that he wouldn’t seriously return to for 50 years. Obviously, its concern with the rural working class is atypical; Scorsese would become well known from “Taxi Driver” on for his urban protagonists and environments, and his best work tends to satirize and dissect characters who wallow in materialist excess; the relatively pure Bill and Bertha in “Boxcar Bertha” rob out of necessity, not the kind of capitalist indulgence that characterizes the heroes of “Casino,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Killers of the Flower Moon” and so many other Scorsese pictures.
“Boxcar Bertha” is, as Scorsese scholar Aaron Baker pointed out in an essay on Scorsese’s career, a rare example of the director engaging with “overtly political material dealing with the oppression of the working class, racial minorities, and women,” and in this regard it does play as a kind of very rough draft for the more elegant, complex treatment of the same theme in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” It also serves as a kind of continuation of issues addressed in a documentary Scorsese made in between “Who’s That Knocking” and “Bertha,” “Street Scenes 1970.”
“Street Scenes 1970” was made by a filmmaking collective supervised by Scorsese while he was teaching at NYU (one of the camera operators was a young student of Scorsese’s named Oliver Stone). It documents protests that occurred in the summer of 1970, when the bombing of Cambodia and the student shootings at Kent State were roiling the nation, and the battles between police and students captured in the film look forward to the conflicts between the rich and powerful and the struggling underclass in “Boxcar Bertha.”
While Scorsese may have taken “Boxcar Bertha” on as a hired hand, his directorial emphasis insured that the movie would highlight those aspects of the script that he found most personal. This meant not only the antiestablishment streak that had begun in “Street Scenes 1970,” Scorsese’s anti-Vietnam short “The Big Shave,” and the counterculture concert film “Woodstock,” which Scorsese co-edited (and, according to Miller’s documentary, co-directed without credit), but a concern with strong women and their struggle to exist in a patriarchal society.
Indeed, “Boxcar Bertha” is the first film — and it’s only Scorsese’s second fiction feature — to challenge the oft-repeated canard that he’s only interested in men and masculine subjects. One of the most impressive things about the movie is the way Scorsese slyly threads the needle of delivering Corman’s required exploitation elements — primarily, a certain amount of sex appeal in terms of Hershey and her body — while using them as a sort of cultural critique.
[Image: BOXCAR BERTHA, Barbara Hershey, David Carradine, 1972]
‘Boxcar Bertha’Courtesy Everett Collection
The confidence of Hershey’s performance serves as a kind of challenge to both the male characters in the movie who view themselves as superior to her and to the audience — and even to the protagonists of earlier and later Scorsese movies. In “Who’s That Knocking,” Harvey Keitel’s J.R. is appalled when he learns his girlfriend has been raped — appalled not by the violence that has been perpetrated against her, but by the fact that in his repressed mind she’s now “impure.” Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver” is incapable of seeing women as anything but madonnas (Cybill Shepherd) and whores (Jodie Foster) — and when he fails to kill the father figure of one, he successfully goes after the father figure of the other.
Although economic circumstances force a fugitive Bertha into prostitution late in the film — it’s the only means of supporting herself that society offers her — Hershey’s conception of the character and Scorsese’s presentation are not limited to these retrograde definitions. Like Ellen Burstyn’s Alice (“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”), Liza Minnelli’s Francine (“New York, New York”), Michelle Pfeiffer’s Countess Olenska (“The Age of Innocence”) and many other Scorsese women, Bertha is spunky but sad, resourceful but limited by the opportunities afforded her by history and social circumstances, and invigorated by her romantic entanglements and held back by them in equal measures.
The scenes in which Scorsese most fulfills Corman’s mandate for female nudity aren’t so much those in which Bertha goes to work in a brothel as the love scenes between her and Bill, which have a tenderness that might seem a bit surprising coming from the director of “Raging Bull.” The fact that Hershey and Carradine were real-life lovers at the time undoubtedly informed Scorsese’s approach, which puts to rest another misconception about him, that he’s more comfortable with scenes of violence than scenes of sex. The sex scenes in “Boxcar Bertha” are extremely erotic, romantic, and expressive of character — we learn as much about Bertha and Bill and their relationship from the sex scenes here as we do about Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds from their musical numbers in “Singin’ in the Rain.”
Meanwhile, the violence in “Boxcar Bertha” is decidedly not sexy or glamorized — which makes it very different from the violence in Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” a movie with which “Boxcar Bertha” shares superficial similarities but which is actually less progressive, in spite of its hip reputation at the time. In “Bonnie and Clyde” the couple’s violent aggression is connected to their sex life (or lack of it); they shoot with guns because the impotent Clyde is shooting blanks in the sex. The sex in “Boxcar Bertha” is disconnected from the violence, which is a concrete reaction to the dismal (and extremely clearly conveyed in visual consultant David Nichols’ art direction) realities of the Depression rather than a screenwriter’s theoretical metaphor.
The fact that the women in Scorsese’s movies are often people his men would disapprove of — and that he alternates between them, with “Boxcar Bertha” being an answer to “Who’s That Knocking” as surely as “Alice” is an answer to “Mean Streets” and “New York, New York” a counter to “Taxi Driver” — speaks not only to the complexity of his world view but the intensity of his cinematic perspective. There’s a sincerity in all of Scorsese’s movies that comes from his hypnotic gift for linking his camera moves and editing rhythms to his characters’ psyches — something that gets him into trouble with the pearl-clutchers when he makes movies about unsavory people, but that gives Bertha a resonance and depth beyond what the script provides.
The feverishness with which Scorsese conveys his characters’ inner lives makes it easy to misinterpret his films about racist characters, like “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver,” as racist, though the idea that depiction is not endorsement should be so obvious to any thinking human that it’s almost insulting to have to state it. Again, the way “Boxcar Bertha” and “Mean Streets” play off of each other is fascinating in this regard, in that “Bertha” gives us a witty, powerful Black hero (Bernie Casey as Bertha and Bill’s colleague Von Morton) one movie before Harvey Keitel’s Charlie stands a girl up on a date because the idea of going out with a Black girl is so repulsive to him and his friends.
[Image: THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, Willem Dafoe as Jesus Christ, 1988, © Universal/courtesy Everett Collection]
‘The Last Temptation of Christ’©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection
The most obvious way in which “Boxcar Bertha” fits into Scorsese’s oeuvre is the way he infuses Christian imagery into the narrative, though the most famous example of this — the brutal crucifixion of Bill by the ruling class’ hired thugs — was evidently already there in the script Scorsese inherited. Even if this was the case, Scorsese’s staging of the scene is specific and unique, and looks forward to the similar visual strategies employed in “The Last Temptation of Christ” — a movie based on a book Scorsese first discovered when Barbara Hershey gave it to him on the set of “Bertha.”
But “Boxcar Bertha” is emblematic of Scorsese in a more fundamental way, which is that it firmly establishes the tension between private obsessions and mass entertainment that Scorsese would struggle with and ultimately master. One reason Scorsese is such an important figure, and his films so enduring, is that he reconciles two seemingly disparate traditions: he’s a Cassavetes-esque maverick and an establishment studio director who subverts Hollywood traditions as skillfully as he honors them.
Even “Mean Streets,” which was financed independently before Warner Bros. purchased it, is a blend between idiosyncratic personal statement and classical gangster flick (the dynamic between Charlie and Johnny Boy echoes movies by directors like Raoul Walsh with actors like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart), and for the rest of his career Scorsese would ride the line between genre and confessional. It’s a gift he was probably born with, but he started honing it at the “Roger Corman Film School” while making “Boxcar Bertha,” and while his ambitions may have slightly outstripped his resources, it remains an essential film by one of the masters of the medium.
“Boxcar Bertha” is now available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Cinématographe.
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[Original source](https://www.indiewire.com/features/commentary/martin-scorsese-boxcar-bertha-pantheon-1235180199/)