Hershey once said that starring in "Boxcar Bertha" (1972) "was the most fun I ever had on a movie." The film, co-starring Hershey's domestic partner, David Carradine, and produced by Roger Corman, was Martin Scorsese's first Hollywood picture. Shot in six weeks on a budget of $600,000, "Boxcar Bertha" was intended to be a period crime drama similar to Corman's "Bloody Mama" (1970) or "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967). Although Corman publicized it as an exploitation piece with plenty of sex and violence, Scorsese's influence made it "something much more". Roger Ebert, of the "Chicago Sun-Times", wrote of the film's direction, "Martin Scorsese has gone for mood and atmosphere more than for action, and his violence is always blunt and unpleasant—never liberating and exhilarating, as the New Violence is supposed to be." A spread recreating sexually explicit scenes from the movie appeared in "Playboy" magazine in 1972.