Boxcar Bertha Movie Review

Notable for being Martin Scorsese's first Hollywood feature and containing Barbara Hershey's most notorious nude scenes, Boxcar Bertha is genre schlock. Cineastes try to read a lot into the film -- commissioned as a reponse to Bonnie and Clyde by Roger Corman -- somehow indicating that Scorsese's greatness was evident (Mean Streets would follow one year later), but Bertha is fundamentally just a Bonnie ripoff, with Hershey and David Carradine galavanting across the Depression-era south with the goal of ruining a railroad, robbing banks and whoring it up along the way. The abrupt ending is strange but oddly relieving.