Barbara Hershey Says the Sex Scenes Weren't Faked — Playboy Recreates Boxcar Bertha's Brothel Montage

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Barbara Hershey Says the Sex Scenes Weren't Faked — Playboy Recreates Boxcar Bertha's Brothel Montage

Boxcar Bertha / Barbara Hershey / 1970s

One of the most notorious talking points to follow Boxcar Bertha out of its 1972 release was Barbara Hershey's blunt admission that some of the film's sex scenes were filmed “without having to fake anything.” Working for Roger Corman on a scrappy, low-budget shoot, Hershey later said the production was “a lot of fun” despite being “terribly crippled by Roger Corman and the violence and sex.” The film's explicit brothel montage — in which Scorsese even turns up for a cameo as one of Bertha's clients — caught the eye of the era's prurient press. Playboy capitalized on that titillation: an August 1972 pictorial recreated the movie's sex scenes, taking the film's lurid publicity into glossy print and cementing its reputation as exploitation cinema rather than prestige period drama. Critics and audiences alike often ended up seeing the blood and sexual content first, obscuring the performances and atmosphere that some reviewers (and the actors themselves) defended.