The Big Shave (1967) Reviews

• The most excrutiatingly good short film of its time

  Quinoa19842002-06-15

  Martin Scorsese cooked up this quick little film before he made his debut feature, and here examines a somewhat anti-Vietnam, perfectionists perspective, all enveloped in one man's craze to shave his face over and over again. Mysterious on the first viewing, graphic on repeated ones, but the effect of it being well crafted in its fakeness and surrealism is noticable. Kudos! A+

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• The Big Shave - Don't try to do it at home

  Fred-Hubner2005-02-05

  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.

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• The Scorsese in the making from the very first

  kami_k2004-10-18

  This is six minutes of introduction to the world of Martin Scorsese. You may anticipate a story but it is only portrait of an obsessive shaver who shaves until he makes a bloodbath out of his face. A gruesome sight to average spectator ,and in one shot even to a more sophisticated one when the man pulls the blade from one end of his neck to another and acts very convincingly, this short film is an unblinking portrait of violence and especially personal violence for that matter, with a strong streak of masochism familiar to the fans of Scorsese. A man shaves or punishes himself for no apparent reason but cleansing(his face or his soul?). Also you can see the making of a director infatuated with the montage who will use its techniques for years to come. The Big Shave also displays an effective use of two colors in jarring contrast for an aesthetic purpose: white of the bathroom and red of the blood. White and Red devour the character and the viewer and signal the world of a director in love with radical shifts and juxtapositions. overall a student film from Scorsese in retrospect is a lesson in film history. Experiment is the prerequisite of perfection. The jazz song which accompanies the whole film and unites its images has been wonderfully used.

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• Excellent Martin Scorsese short film

  duce1222002-11-19

  The Big Shave (1967) D: Martin Scorsese. Peter Bernuth. Excellent Martin Scorsese short film about a young man who is shaving and cuts himself, with the results symbolic of the Vietnam War, which Scorsese was opposed to. The camerawork is fluid and flawless, the scene very bloody, but wonderfully done, one of the best short films I've seen. RATING: 9 out of 10.

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• Scorsese's bloodiest film

  pjbrubak2005-09-26

  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.

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