Old Yorker

  • Scarecrow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jerry Schatzberg (1973)

    The 1970s really were a golden age of American cinema.  Scarecrow, which I’d never seen before, was a (for me) salutary reminder that it’s wrong to assume that every well-known movie of the period was twenty-four carat.  It’s the story of two drifters Max Millan (Gene Hackman) and Francis Lionel ‘Lion’ Delbuchi (Al Pacino) – an ornery ex-con and an ESN ex-sailor respectively – who meet in California, travel through Denver and end up in Detroit (never making it to Pittsburgh, where Max was heading).   If you’d never seen Hackman and Pacino before you saw Scarecrow you’d have been blown away by them – but, even in 1973, you almost certainly would have seen them before – in (at least) Bonnie and Clyde and The French Connection and The Godfather.  (As it turned out, relatively few people saw them in Scarecrow anyway:  the film didn’t do well commercially.)  What’s most striking about each of the two actors here is that the register of his acting is the reverse of what increasingly became his usual style.  Pacino, apart from a few physically extrovert bits and a couple of impressions, is quiet and natural.  (As a result, Lion isn’t as consistently dim as some of the dialogue suggests he’s meant to be – but that’s no bad thing.)  I found Hackman uncharacteristically strained at the start.  He’s increasingly impressive as he gets into Max although the conception of this character always seems artificial.   Scarecrow, which jointly won the main prize at Cannes in 1973 (with the British film The Hireling), also represents a reversal of the physical types in the period’s best-known movie about two male misfit-losers whose loneliness pushes them into an uncertain, fragile friendship.  In Midnight Cowboy, the tall guy is the benign and trusting one and the pint-sized one has the brittle, cantankerous wit.  Both films end, though, with the smaller man out of this world (although Lion is catatonic rather than dead, as Ratso is) and the survivor having learned to feel something good for someone else.

    Scarecrow, photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, opens with a remarkable shot of a vast, dusty Californian landscape but the appearance of the lone, tiny figure of a man in the barren terrain is a resounding signal of what’s to come:  the sound of the wind blowing is accompanied by that of a symbolic lead weight dropping.   From then on, Scarecrow is a series of familiar variations on the theme of what it is to be shut out of the American Dream.  You have to hand it to the screenwriter Garry Michael White that he keeps squeezing more predictable and garish misery out of his meagre idea but the story and themes are tired:  Max and Lion are determined to hold on to their doomed ambitions – Max to start a car wash business, Lion to see the kid he’s never seen.  Jerry Schatzberg mistakenly directs as if there’s depth in the screenplay and Fred Myrow supplies music to match (self-consciously eccentric but with triumph-of-the-human-spirit phrases).  Schatzberg keeps aiming for eloquent and ‘significant’ images all the way.  There’s a sequence in a bar where Max does a joky semi-striptease – the camera moves round the sad faces of people relieved by entertainment, however crummy.   Lion falls into his catatonic trance against the backdrop of a park fountain surrounded by stone cherubs.  He carries with him a present for his child:  a lamp in a box, which remains immaculate throughout his travels and travails until it becomes bashed about for its final, heartbreaking scene.

    It’s not a surprise that most of the supporting actors are more or less forgotten at this distance in time.   The main exceptions are Eileen Brennan and Ann Wedgeworth although neither distinguishes herself here:  their characters are overdrawn and that’s how they’re played.  Penelope Allen, who appeared with Pacino again in Dog Day Afternoon, is the mother of his child in Scarecrow.   The close-up of her during a phone conversation with Lion is painful in the wrong way.   When Max and Lion are in jail, another prisoner (Richard Lynch) takes a shine to Lion then brutally assaults him.   The pederastic tendencies of the assailant are announced loud and clear from his first appearance (he has blow-dried blonde hair that’s conspicuous in the prison setting).   The make-up for Al Pacino’s eye injury is so gruesomely convincing that it’s very surprising, although undoubtedly a relief, that it heals so quickly.  There’s a lengthy explanation of the film’s title which I’ve already forgotten.  Something to do with crows laughing.

    29 April 2013

     

     

  • Serpico

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sidney Lumet (1973)

    The film was made very shortly after the real-life events that it describes.  Frank Serpico, a Brooklyn-born New York Police Department officer who worked undercover to expose police corruption, was shot and seriously injured during a drugs raid in early 1971, testified before the Knapp Commission late the same year, received the NYPD ‘Medal of Honor’ in May 1972 and retired the next month.   Peter Maas’s book about Serpico, on which Waldo Salt’s screenplay is based, was published the following year and Sidney Lumet’s movie opened in December 1973.  Serpico, with Al Pacino in the title role, isn’t as involving or as entertaining as you’d expect (or as I remembered, from 1974).  The speed at which it was put together – the movie was shot in ten weeks – may be part of the problem.  Salt’s script is sketchy and Sidney Lumet relies principally on the length of Serpico’s hair and beard, and the size of his Old English Sheepdog, to convey the passage of time.  Lumet stages some of the crime action very well:  an arrest that Serpico makes after a gang rape; the sequence in which he’s shot.  Elsewhere, though, the direction seems hurried and untidy.

    On his first day as an NYPD patrolman, Serpico goes to the canteen and insists on a sandwich different from the one that the man behind the counter recommends.  This is meant to be an immediate clue to the hero’s cussed refusal to accept the status quo, and it’s a warning of how obviously the hero’s attitude will be established.  An early scene involving his family briefly promises to use Serpico’s life outside work as a means of dramatising his character but the family are then forgotten until the parents’ reappearance, several years later, as their son lies critically ill from his bullet wounds.  Lumet and Salt seem determined to minimise the possibilities of making Serpico less isolated and single-minded.  He has two girlfriends in the course of the film.   The first one is there simply to demonstrate that she and her social world – peopled by would-be writers and actors who earn a living as insurance clerks etc – are too airy-fairy for Serpico’s liking.  The writing of a party scene involving this crowd is crude and the scene doesn’t fit into the overall scheme of the movie but it’s almost welcome because of that, and because Serpico can behave somewhat differently in it.  The second girlfriend, Laurie, is more significant.   A few of the scenes between her and Frank, especially the less tortured ones, are good but the film-makers, like Serpico himself, seem to regard this love interest as fundamentally distracting to their mission.  Barbara Eda Young, the actress who plays Laurie, occasionally suggests a resistance to this conception of her role as well as to Frank’s order of priorities.   Al Pacino’s surprise when Laurie repeats that her relationship with Serpico is over is a strong moment and he gets the hero’s real, though blinkered, intelligence very well.   Throughout the movie, though, Pacino is more effective throwing a line away than emoting it.  He often gets shouty.  And though Serpico’s eccentric appearance and clothing are no doubt based on how he really looked, they still suggest an actor dressing up.

    This illustrates a larger problem with Serpico.  It’s not only based on a true story; it’s based on one so well known at the time that Lumet feels no need to remind the audience of that in the opening credits.  Yet the movie feels phony – it’s an example of relying on the fact that something really happened as an excuse for not taking the trouble to make it convincing on screen.  It’s understandable if Frank Serpico saw the whole NYPD as a malign conspiracy but Sidney Lumet makes the other policemen, in spite of a cast that includes Jack Kehoe and F Murray Abraham, monotonously nasty and transparently corrupt.   The rare exceptions, like the character played by Tony Roberts, seem altogether out of place, although the more nuanced John Randolph is convincing as one of the senior cops.   Pacino’s principal co-star is a score by Mikis Theodorakis which is interruptive and confusingly Greek-sounding.  (Serpico is from Italian-American stock.)  The music doesn’t occur for long stretches then, when it returns, it dominates to ridiculous effect.  It drowns out Serpico’s voice at the Commission hearings.  Whenever he’s sharing a scene with Theodorakis, Al Pacino really does need to shout.

    30 April 2013

     

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