Boxcar Bertha

Plot

Bertha Thompson was a poor girl from the South whose father died in a crop-dusting plane crash, leaving her an orphan. When the Great Depression hit, she began hopping freight trains. She later fell in love with union organizer Big Bill Shelly, and along with gambler Rake Brown and Von Morton, a man who once worked for her father, they stumbled into a series of train and bank robberies. Their enemy was railway boss H. Buckram Sartoris. As hunted fugitives, Rake was shot dead, and Bill and Von were sent to a chain gang. Bertha escaped but turned to prostitution. She found Von in a Black tavern, learned Bill had broken out, and went to him. They reunited, but Sartoris's men burst in and crucified Bill. Von then killed the henchmen and freed Bertha.

Production

Martin Scorsese first crossed paths with Roger Corman after arriving in Hollywood to edit Medicine Ball Caravan. Corman had caught Who’s That Knocking at My Door during its 1970 Los Angeles run and liked it, so he asked Scorsese to direct a follow-up to Bloody Mama. The project shifted into Boxcar Bertha after Julie Corman came across Sister of the Road. Scorsese was handed the lead cast—Barbara Hershey, David Carradine, and Barry Primus—along with a 24-day shoot in Arkansas and a budget of $600,000.

That tight budget forced him to trim the script and scrap plans to film in Baton Rouge and Texarkana. Train sequences were shot using the Reader Railroad. Scorsese said he rewrote the character Rake Brown so thoroughly that the role came to represent himself. The original ending would have shown Bertha dancing at a New Orleans funeral surrounded by Black people.

The film is packed with nods to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: Hershey’s hairstyle in the opening mirrors Dorothy’s, and she delivers the line about ignoring the man behind the curtain in a brothel scene. On set, the cast joked that Carradine was the Scarecrow, Bernie Casey the Tin Man, and Primus the Cowardly Lion. The locomotive used was a 1920 Baldwin 2-6-2 No. 108, later seen on the Conway Scenic Railroad, now awaiting restoration in Texas; another engine, USATC S160 No. 1702, appears and now runs at the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad.

Scorsese makes a cameo as one of Bertha’s clients during the brothel montage. Hershey later described the film as fun but hampered by Corman’s demands for violence and sex, adding that the sex scenes were shot without any faking.

Reception

Boxcar Bertha received mixed reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 57% approval rating with a mean of 5.7 out of 10 based on 28 reviews; the critical consensus says the film is too derivative of other Roger Corman crime pictures and feels more like a training exercise for Scorsese than a fully formed picture. John Cassavetes, after viewing a rough cut, told Scorsese he had spent a year making a piece of shit and advised him not to get hooked into the exploitation market, inspiring Scorsese's next film Mean Streets.

Roger Ebert gave three stars out of four, calling it a weirdly interesting movie that goes for mood and atmosphere, with violence that is blunt and unpleasant. Howard Thompson of The New York Times found it an interesting surprise, praising Carradine's performance and Scorsese's direction. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Scorsese shaped familiar material into a viable film. Arthur D. Murphy of Variety gave a negative review, stating the film is little more than an excuse to slaughter people, with the final cut stripping away mood and motivation.

Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave one star out of four, calling it a trashy movie whose violence merely depresses. Tom Milne of The Monthly Film Bulletin declared it abrasively scripted, stunningly shot, and beautifully acted, much more than an exploitation picture.