Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg, 1973)

Al Pacino and Gene Hackman in Scarecrow

Cast: Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Dorothy Tristan, Ann Wedgeworth, Richard Lynch, Eileen Brennan, Penelope Allen, Richard Hackman, Al Cingolani, Rutanya Alda. Screenplay: Gerry Michael White. Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Production design: Albert Brenner. Film editing: Evan A. Lottman. Music: Fred Myrow.

Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow is the quintessential '70s film: a road movie featuring two actors on the verge of becoming legendary. It's long on character development and short on plot. Essentially, the narrative is there to provide reciprocal character arcs: The tough guy (Gene Hackman) softens and the soft guy (Al Pacino) toughens. Hackman and Pacino play drifters with unlikely dreams: Hackman's Max wants to open a car wash and enlists Pacino's Lion in his scheme, though Lion wants to make a stop along the way to reconnect with his ex, whom he left pregnant, and meet the child he has never seen. We know that they'll never fulfill these dreams, so the only suspense in the film is over how badly it will end for them. So mostly it's about performance, which Scarecrow adequately supplies. Scarecrow is something of a forgotten film, overshadowed by more celebrated ones in the two actors' oeuvre, and even a historian of the era in which it was made, Peter Biskind, dismissed it as a "secondary" work. But it deserves to be rediscovered, not just for the performances but also as a reminder of how significant the decade in which it was made is to film history.

The Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971)

Kitty Winn and Al Pacino in The Panic in Needle Park

Cast: Al Pacino, Kitty Winn, Alan Vint, Richard Bright, Kiel Martin, Michael McClanathan, Warren Finnerty, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Raul Julia. Screenplay: Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, based on a book by James Mills. Cinematography: Adam Holender. Art direction: Murray P. Stern. Film editing: Evan A. Lottman. 

The Panic in Needle Park doesn't have much in the way of character arc: Bobby (Al Pacino) and Helen (Kitty Winn) end up pretty much the way they began, in search of a fix. What it does have going for it is immersiveness, a determined effort to plunge the viewer into the midst of some lost lives. That this perhaps isn't enough to make for an effective movie is, I think, signaled by some of the tricks screenwriters Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne pull, to heighten the viewer's emotional connection to the characters, which at one point involves the sacrifice of a cute puppy. But the movie is effective, largely because it's so well acted. It gave us one of our first looks at Pacino at his most hyperactive, as well as one of our rare looks at Winn, whose performance deservedly won the best actress award at Cannes. They're surrounded by a superb ensemble.