In the final scene of Martin Scorsese’s second feature film Boxcar Bertha, the luckless heroine, played by Barbara Hershey, vainly pursues the freight car from which her labour organiser lover (David Carradine) is dangling, having just been crucified by capitalist goons. The sequence foreshadows the scene in his 11th film, The Last Temptation of Christ, where Hershey, now playing the luckless Mary Magdalene, will again see her inamorata crucified. As before, he falls victim to goons.
An unsatisfactory love affair will result in a completely unexpected crucifixion in Gangs of New York – goons again – while crucifixions with no explicitly erotic subtext occur all over the place in Silence. I know all this because I just spent a month watching all 26 of Scorsese’s feature films – rewatching them mostly – and noticed patterns and themes running through his work I had not noticed before. From 1972’s Boxcar Bertha to 2016’s Silence, a solemn, autumnal film about overmatched Jesuits in 17th-century Japan, the message in Scorsese’s work is repeated again and again. Violence is a fact of life. In affairs of the heart, women almost always back the wrong horse. And if you keep messing with the wrong people, you’ll end up hanging from a tree.
