Scarecrow
Scarecrow is a road movie from 1973. Directed by New York photographer and director Jerry Schatzberg, this film follows the relationship between two vagabonds as they attempt to rise above the standards of life they are used to. Scarecrow stars Al Pacino and Gene Hackman as the two vagabonds, using each actor’s strengths to build compelling characters for the narrative.
Pacino stars as Francis Lionel Delbuchi, a sailor who is on his way back home to see the child born while he was out at sea. He happens upon Max (Hackman), who is an ex-con, as they are hitchhiking up the same road. Max ignores Lionel at first, but eventually the pair become fast friends as a result of Lionel’s sense of humour. Max and Lionel have breakfast together at a diner and Max lets Lionel in on a business proposition to open up a car wash. Max has a temper, however, and he and Lionel make for an interesting pair as they travel the countryside meeting various people and coming closer to opening up their business. The film follows this journey as the two men come into conflict, get put in prison for a time, and meet different women. It truly is the ultimate road movie.
The road movie is a film that has been done several times before. Of Mice and Men, for example, had a little farm as the ultimate goal. Easy Rider focused on retirement in Florida. Midnight Cowboy had its orange groves. With Scarecrow, there’s a car wash. Perhaps more importantly than that to Max and Lionel, though, there is a fresh start as the dirt comes off of those cars. Both men are in need of something new and of something fresh. Both men need a shade of redemption and this becomes more and more apparent as the characters play out their lives on the screen. Each character has made mistakes, continues to make mistakes, and likely will always make mistakes. Nobody learns from their actions or changes the course of their lives to any significant degree. Outlooks change, prospects change, but the people in Scarecrow do not change.
This lazy flow to the film would have been nice had it consistently rode out the drama throughout the duration of the film. It seems, however, that director Schatzberg eventually tires of the pace and decides to throw in a carbon copy “tragic” ending. Without spoiling it, I will say that the final scenes of Scarecrow suddenly buck the slow and easy trend that made the film so enjoyable. It’s a good thing that Hackman and Pacino are two of the greatest actors of all time because Scarecrow would have sunken to instant obscurity (it almost has) had it not been for those two. Schatzberg, while he does capture some glorious cinematography, often doesn’t give enough credit to his actors and instead allows the film to suffer through a sort of haze of lighting mistakes, often like peering through a fog. Granted, the remastered DVD cut of the film seems to have corrected this problem somewhat, but there is no question that Schatzberg and Vilmos Zsigmond are obsessed with the visuals.
Pacino is wonderful to watch in Scarecrow; his performance is reason enough to see it. Pacino is still in the early stages of his career, having just finished The Godfather the year before in 1972. He had also acted for Schatzberg in the 1971 film The Panic in Needle Park, a film that closely resembles the style of this film. Pacino works the comedic role here, but does so with a haunting tragedy. There is a ghost of a man within Pacino’s Lionel and Al works hard so that the ghost is never seen. It’s too bad that the film had to blow the reason behind its title, as it would have been nice to have Pacino really represent a scarecrow instead of demonstrating with obvious candor that he really was the scarecrow.
Hackman is equally good as Max, the guy who loves to fight and thinks he’s tough as nails. Max is willing to lay a beating on a guy and does appear to be able to hold his own in a fight, that much is clear. But Hackman brings a sort of obnoxious innocence to Max that belies a reality in which Max probably has no idea as to what he’s doing. His internal confusion and complexity is on display thanks to Hackman. In the hands of a lesser performer, Max would have suffered from the typical failings of such a character. In the hands of Hackman, however, the tragedy of Max’s anger and rage really comes to light with clarity and a sort of odd sweetness.
All in all, Scarecrow is certainly worth a look. It is, at times, in love with its own style to the point that it plods along while milking the wide shot for all its worth. Still, when Hackman and Pacino are rambling and rolling across America, Scarecrow is a film worth its salt. It is a road movie with soul and purpose, but it may not stack up that well against some of the true greats. Worth seeing for a solid early Pacino performance and the great work of Gene Hackman.
Trailer:
