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
