VEILED THREATS by Phil Mershon
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      • This Film is Not Yet Rated
      • Incident at Oglala
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      • Capote
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      • The Deer Hunter
      • Let the Right One In
      • Colour Me Kubrick
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      • A Scanner Darkly
      • Salem's Lot
      • Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired
      • The Seven-Ups
      • The Contender
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      • The Pledge
      • American: The Bill Hicks Story
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      • Milk
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      • Trumbo
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      • Into the Abyss
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    • Hud
    • Pressure Point
    • Blow Up
    • Requiem for a Heavyweight
    • Hurry Sundown
  • Human Flood
    • Jean-Luc Godard >
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      • Boxcar Bertha
    • Steven Spielberg >
      • Duel
    • Oliver Stone >
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      • DODES'KA-DEN
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      • 400 Blows
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      • Bed and Board
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      • To Catch a Thief
      • The Wrong Man
      • Suspicion
      • Saboteur
      • Lifeboat
      • Notorious
      • Rope
      • North by Northwest
      • Psycho
      • The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
  • No Particular Place to Go
  • The Pits
    • The Big Chill
    • W. C. Fields and Me
    • Zabriskie Point
    • Eat The Document
    • Hitler: The Last Ten Days
    • A Boy and His Dog
    • A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • The Executioner's Song
    • The Visitors
    • Paul McCartney Really is Dead
    • Going Places
    • Pi
    • Erik the Viking
    • Sometimes They Come Back
    • Thinner
    • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    • A Bullet for Pretty Boy
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Here is the final paragraph of the review Roger Ebert wrote in 1972 after viewing the American International Picture Boxcar Bertha. "[Director Martin] Scorsese remains one of the bright young hopes of American movies. His brilliant first film won the 1968 Chicago Film Festival as I Call First and later played as Who's That Knocking at My Door? He was an assistant editor and director of Woodstock, and now, many frustrated projects later, here is his first conventional feature. He is good with actors, good with his camera and determined to take the grade-zilch exploitation film and bend it to his own vision. Within the limits of the film's possibilities, he has succeeded."
    Well, hey, well, hey. Yummy kudos from Roger Ebert. When the Big Ebe calls you out as a rising star, you can best believe your time has come, my friend. Of course, it helps to have Roger and Julie Corman backing you with finance and a nonsense story about getting the rights to radical labor struggler Bertha Thompson's story through the closed door of a bag o' fleas hotel, even though the story had already been written by anarchist physician Ben Reitman. It also really helps to have an unknown but interesting David Carradine and an unknown but fascinating Barbara Hershey starring in your film. But mostly it helps to be a young Martin Scorsese.
   Corman was the mastermind behind AIP's most interesting crime-violence films, of which Bloody Mama was perhaps one of the more inspired. Even though RC may have made shoot-outs and death scenes art fodder for the drive-in set, it was MS who made it into Art and it happened with Bertha. 
    This film radiates the way the street scenes in Taxi Driver did, with the neon signs dripping their colors all over the Great Depression train rides. The film includes a couple of racy sex scenes between Hershey as Bertha and Carradine as Big Bill Shelly, yet there is a degree of tenderness and even sensitivity to these scenes that was unlike anything in the traditionally exploitative American International canon. 
    In the film, a young Bertha loses her father to the bullying greed of a capitalist exploiter. No one comes right out and tells us that this is the impetus for her life of crime, and indeed little mention is made of the event of her dad's passing. Big Bill and his African American friend Vox team up with Bertha and Rake (the world's worst gambler) to punish the railroad owner (played by father John Carradine), Bill constantly reminding all his robbery victims that he is not a criminal; he's a union organizer. 
    The story itself is highly fictionalized and probably even based on a compound of characters, but that matters very little. Scorsese gets the details exactly right, with even the music serving to carry along the camera from one adventure to the next.
    I will tell you that even now, forty years after its initial release, the last ten minutes of the film are hard to take sitting down. All the same, the film does what few other movies--very few--had then managed with any degree of success. Boxcar Bertha aims reasoned reaction to the idea that the guys in white hats are necessarily the good guys. Of course, the early 1970s drive-in audience that flocked to AIP's movies already understood that and understood it well. Any high school greaser who'd ever been bullied by his principal, any rocker who'd been ridiculed by his relatives, any protester who'd been clubbed by the police, any girl who'd been pawed by her teachers, any black people who'd ever walked out their front doors--in short, everyone who was lined up to slurp down a bottle of Coke and a flask of rum at the Star-View Drive-In knew the self-righteous twinkle in the eye of the man holding the whip and each of us wanted not so much revenge as expiation and validation. 
    Look for the director making a cameo near the end of Bertha's scene in the bordello.
    This remains a good story, well told. 

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  • Home
  • Links
  • The Deluge
    • Veiled Threats >
      • 1939-1945
      • 1946-1963
      • 1964-1975
      • 1976-1985
      • Born Losers
      • Don't Look Back
      • Bonnie and Clyde
      • Cool Hand Luke
      • The Graduate
      • Up Tight!
      • Cycle Savages
      • Wild in the Streets
      • Never a Dull Moment
      • Yellow Submarine
      • Night of the Living Dead
      • Faces
      • The Love Bug
      • Midnight Cowboy
      • Easy Rider
      • Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
      • Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
      • They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
      • The Magic Christian
      • Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
      • The Landlord
      • The Ballad of Cable Hogue
      • Getting Straight
      • The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
      • Five Easy Pieces
      • Godard in America
      • Gimme Shelter
      • Little Big Man
      • The Boys in the Band
      • Joe
      • The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
      • The Big Boss
      • There's a Girl in my Soup
      • The Liberation of L B Jones
      • Klute
      • The French Connection
      • Willie Dynamite
      • Helter Skelter
      • King: A Filmed Record
      • Get Carter
      • Harold and Maude
      • Panic in Needle Park
      • Across 110th Street
      • And Soon the Darkness
      • Deliverance
      • Rolling Thunder
      • Super Fly
      • Busting
      • The Ruling Class
      • The Harder They Come
      • Day of the Jackal
      • Play Misty For Me
      • The Jezebels
      • Sacco & Vanzetti
      • Badlands
      • Cold Turkey
      • Soldier Blue
      • American Graffiti
      • The Falcon and the Snowman
      • Watership Down
      • Scarecrow
      • Walking Tall
      • Frances
      • The Coca-Cola Kid
      • Bob Roberts
      • Bad Company
      • We Are Marshall
      • Patton
      • The Natural
      • The Crossing Guard
      • Reds
      • The Spook Who Sat by the Door
      • Mud
      • Who is Harry Nilsson
      • Ornette: Made in America
      • Six Degrees of Separation
      • This Film is Not Yet Rated
      • Incident at Oglala
      • That Championship Season
      • The Pope of Greenwich Village
      • Little Murders
      • Assault on Precinct 13
      • Capote
      • Inglourious Basterds
      • The Friends of Eddie Coyle
      • Scorpio
      • The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
      • A New Leaf
      • Seven Psychopaths
      • The Last House on the Left
      • The Deer Hunter
      • Let the Right One In
      • Colour Me Kubrick
      • A Time to Kill
      • A Scanner Darkly
      • Salem's Lot
      • Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired
      • The Seven-Ups
      • The Contender
      • Hoffa
      • The Pledge
      • American: The Bill Hicks Story
      • Donnie Brasco
      • Bugsy
      • Milk
      • Reservoir Dogs
      • Glengarry Glen Ross
      • V for Vendetta
      • Trumbo
      • Two in the Wave
      • South of the Border
      • Into the Abyss
      • God Bless America
  • Before the Deluge
    • The Bicycle Thief
    • Judgment at Nuremberg
    • Five Minutes to Live
    • The Manchurian Candidate
    • Hud
    • Pressure Point
    • Blow Up
    • Requiem for a Heavyweight
    • Hurry Sundown
  • Human Flood
    • Jean-Luc Godard >
      • Breathless
      • Masculine Feminine
      • Film Socialisme
    • Brian De Palma >
      • Sisters
      • The Fury
    • Stanley Kubrick >
      • Lolita
      • 2001: A Space Odyssey
      • A Clockwork Orange
      • The Shining
      • Full Metal Jacket
    • Francis Coppola >
      • The Conversation
      • Apocalypse Now
    • Woody Allen >
      • Take the Money and Run
      • Bananas
      • Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But were Afraid to Ask
      • Sleeper
      • Love and Death
      • Annie Hall
      • Interiors
      • Manhattan
      • Stardust Memories
      • Zelig
      • Broadway Danny Rose
      • The Purple Rose of Cairo
      • Hannah and Her Sisters
      • Radio Days
    • Robert Altman >
      • M*A*S*H
      • Brewster McCloud
      • 3 Women
      • Nashville
      • The Gingerbread Man
      • Ready to Wear
      • Gosford Park
      • The Player
    • Luis Bunuel >
      • The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    • Roman Polanski >
      • Cul-de-Sac
      • Rosemary's Baby
      • MacBeth
      • The Tenant
    • Martin Scorsese >
      • Boxcar Bertha
    • Steven Spielberg >
      • Duel
    • Oliver Stone >
      • Talk Radio
    • Orson Welles >
      • F For Fake
    • Akira Kurosawa >
      • DODES'KA-DEN
    • Max Ophuls
    • John Ford >
      • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
    • John Huston
    • Frank Capra
    • Billy Wilder
    • Roger Corman
    • Bernardo Bertolucci
    • Elia Kazan
    • William Wyler
    • Spike Lee
    • Francois Truffaut >
      • 400 Blows
      • Jules and Jim
      • Bed and Board
    • Jean Renoir
    • Federico Fellini
    • Charlie Chaplin
    • John Cassavetes
    • Agnes Vargas
    • Alain Resnais
    • Eric Rohmer >
      • Claire's Knee
    • Ida Lupino
    • Leni Riefenstahl
    • Penny Marshall
    • Costa-Gavras >
      • The Confession
      • Missing
    • Alfred Hitchcock >
      • Spellbound
      • Shadow of a Doubt
      • The Birds
      • I Confess
      • Dial M for Murder
      • Rear Window
      • To Catch a Thief
      • The Wrong Man
      • Suspicion
      • Saboteur
      • Lifeboat
      • Notorious
      • Rope
      • North by Northwest
      • Psycho
      • The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
  • No Particular Place to Go
  • The Pits
    • The Big Chill
    • W. C. Fields and Me
    • Zabriskie Point
    • Eat The Document
    • Hitler: The Last Ten Days
    • A Boy and His Dog
    • A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • The Executioner's Song
    • The Visitors
    • Paul McCartney Really is Dead
    • Going Places
    • Pi
    • Erik the Viking
    • Sometimes They Come Back
    • Thinner
    • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    • A Bullet for Pretty Boy
  • Links