Hannah and Her Sisters

In typical Woody Allen fashion, Hannah and Her Sisters is a comedy-drama that intertwines several stories from a large cast. The plot centres around three sisters and their often interconnecting relationships. Hannah (Mia Farrow) is a successful Actress and married to financial advisor Elliot (Michael Caine) who in turn is infatuated with Hannah’s sister, Lee (Barbara Hershey). Lee is in a relationship with a reclusive artist named Frederick (Max von Sydow) but begins to realise that she too has feelings for Elliot. The third sister Holly (Dianne Wiest) is an unsuccessful Actress who is recovering from a cocaine addiction. The final piece of the jigsaw is a hypochondriac TV Producer and Hannah’s ex-husband Mickey (Woody Allen) whose philosophy on life changes as the plot progresses due to the sudden realisation that he will one day die.

The film is set over a two year period but also contains flashbacks to times before the narrative began to contextualise certain relationships. Voice over from several of the actors provide the audience with access to the characters inner thoughts as the merry go round of associations and affairs slowly unfolds. The film is witty and sometimes interesting but for a fairly short film, it felt long and sometimes tedious.

Boxcar Bertha

Martin Scorsese’s second picture and the second in my Scorsese in Sequence feature is Boxcar Bertha. Bertha Thompson (Barbara Hershey) is a young woman whose father dies in an aircraft accident. With no money and no home she travels around the Depression hit South aboard railway boxcars. Along the way she meets ‘Big’ Bill Shelly (David Carradine), a Union Man and suspected Communist. The two of them begin a relationship and along with Yankee, Rake Brown (Barry Primus) and ‘negro’, Von Morton (Bernie Casey) take to robbing trains as a means of surviving.

This is unlike most other Scorsese films. It is the only one to feature a woman in the central role and one of only a handful set outside of the East Coast. As a result it feels amongst the least Scorsese-esque of his films. The direction is fairly straightforward. There are no trademark long tracking shots, very little popular music and cutting is slow and traditional. One area in which Scorsese does stick to type is with Bertha’s moral ambiguity. At the beginning she is a sweet young girl but towards the end she is a woman who will do anything it takes to survive and appears to enjoy the wilder side of life. The film also contains Scorsese’s trademark violence, especially in an unexpectedly brutal final scene.