Martin Scorsese (1968)

In the six-minute short The Big Shave, a young man (Peter Bernuth) stands in front of a bathroom mirror and shaves his face.  He makes a tidy job of it but, even when clean-shaven, doesn’t stop.  He keeps on working the razor until his face is a bloody mess – or a battlefield.  Either description suits the interpretation of the shaver’s self-mutilation as a pithy allegory of America’s self-destructive refusal to leave well alone in Vietnam.  (The film has an alternative title of Viet ’67 and the shaver has the look of a soldier.)  Although The Big Shave is in colour rather than black and white, the blood going down the plughole naturally evokes Psycho.  Otherwise, this is a distinctive film – the briefest, simplest and most (no other word for it) incisive of the three Martin Scorsese shorts I saw during the current BFI retrospective.  (The others were What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963) and It’s Not Just You, Murray! (1964).)  Of all the blood-letting in all the Scorsese films I’ve watched in recent weeks, this was the hardest not to look away from – perhaps because of the calm relentlessness of the piece.  (There are no spoken words; the bathroom action is accompanied throughout by Bunny Berigan’s ‘I Can’t Get Started’.)  BFI did well to show The Big Shave as a curtain raiser to New York, New York.  The only musical drama in the Scorsese oeuvre to date, though far from bloodless, is unusual too for its lack of the red stuff.

11 February 2017