Boxcar Bertha (Martin Scorsese, 1972)

I've wanted to watch this film for a while. It's Scorsese's first feature, a Bonnie & Clyde-type movie made for Roger Corman, but I wasn't expecting much. Nothing I've ever read about Scorsese ever paid much attention to this film. There is usually a brief mention, then they move on to Mean Streets, the first "real" Scorsese. Kubrick's earliest films are rarely discussed either, because they allegedly don't display much of Kubrick's style, so I was pretty amazed to find that this is, in every respect, a full-blown Martin Scorsese flick. His style is fully formed here: the urgently-moving camera, the use of music, the brutal violence. It's not very different from, say, Goodfellas. And it absolutely kicks ass. The camera follows characters being chased through trainyards, and the motion of the camera is as much a part of the excitement as the motion of the actors and trains. And the beatdowns in this film are fucking brutal, climaxing with the agonizing murder of David Carradine's union organizing martyr (this would make a great double bill with Bound for Glory, which I caught a bit of on The Sundance Channel earlier this month). This is as close as Scorsese would come to making a full-on action movie until the wildly uneven Gangs of New York.