The Big Shave

Martin Scorsese's third short film before he graduated into feature film making is,despite being only six minutes long,a considerable cinematic achievement.Even at this early stage in his career,Scorsese shows considerable technical excellence,distinctive style and panache,showing that in just the simplest,most banal of settings(a bathroom)on a zero budget,he can produce memorable images and moments that most other film directors can't manage in films three hours long. Apparently intended as a black joke against the then on-going conflict in Vietnam,the contrast between the clean,white bathroom and the young man's visceral,gory,but seemingly unconscious gradual self-harm while taking a shave brings sheer gasps and giggles of astonishment at it's sheer audacity.A taster of the brilliance to come in the next four decades.

The ritual of shaving and it's risks is explored by a young Scorsese. Surely every man has felt the fear/temptation of cutting one's self with a razor. A typical outlet for his self-loathing Catholic guilt, the gore is contrapuntally balanced by incongruous music on the soundtrack. Bunny Berigan's "I Can't Get Started" recalls the blackly comic ending to "Dr. Strangelove" with "We'll Meet Again" accompanying images of nuclear holocaust. Strangely, the young man in the feature is not in need of a shave in the slightest. And he shaves a second time in a row, the second time with bloody consequences. As other reviewers have posted, there may be some symbolic significance to this short film. Knowing Scorsese, it undoubtedly operates on many levels. It is to his credit as a filmmaker that he is able to make a solitary, mundane task so attention-grabbing.

Big Shave, The (1967)

**** (out of 4)

Six-minute short from the now legendary director feature a lot of his trademark even though this is basically just a student film. A young man goes in front of the mirror to shave and it goes fine until he decides to do it again and this time he butchers his face with the razor, which sends blood all down the sink. I've heard this was an anti-Vietnam film but I really didn't see it as such, although I guess you could draw a message out of what happens here. To me this is a wonderful little black comedy that's certainly going to hit home to anyone who has ever cut themselves shaving. The film doesn't go for minor little cuts but instead it's a real bloodbath and I might even go as far as to say this contains some of the most blood ever put on film during this time. You have the H.G. Lewis films of course and I can't help but wonder if Scorsese was a fan of those since there's a lot of the same humor here. The movie has a nice music score, great editing and in the end is just painfully funny.

This film is closely related to my adolescence ... rather iconic. I've seen it only once a few months after completing fourteen years of age (1970). Back then, the UCSD had a very active cine-club ... and thanks to it I had access to films like La Jetée, Young Aphrodite, Midnight Cowboy, Catch-22, Deep Throat (in which I fell asleep after its first five minutes) and many others.

At first I found it rather boring and unappealing. A man shaving ... definitely isn't something a pubescent male teenager would care for, but since it's only six minutes long ... soon, the whole intended idea started to fall in place. The flowing and perfectly edited strong images left me totally assured that I was watching a powerful work of art and criticism. As the years passed by, the film's images were surely imprinted in my memory ... but the title simply vanished from all recall efforts. Once I got acquainted with IMDb's message boards, I posted a message asking about which could its title be ... promptly and correctly answered by an user signing as Weeping Prophet.

Usually The Big Shave is understood as a hyperbolic criticism towards America's engagement in the Vietnam war. While at a very shallow level it can be understood as so, the deeper message is very prophetic encompassing the whole future of America's mainstream film productions concerning the glorification of violence in itself. Well, in those happy days of open confrontation and anti-war rallies I understood it as a film about our everyday acts of self-destruction undertook as a matter of fact events ... including America's vaguely justified involvement in the civil war going on in Vietnam.

It's a film everyone should watch and one of Scorsese's most powerful films.

So I'm not the only person who's had this particular spooky dream! Plainly influenced by Kenneth Anger, this eye-watering short looks more like an early work by David Lynch than Martin Scorsese.