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| 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.
