A treasure of the 1970s, Scarecrow feels as if it could only have been made in that decade of studio insecurity, idiosyncratic storytelling, and unconventional leading men.
Gene Hackman stars as Max, a recently paroled drifter with big plans to open a car wash if he can make it from California to Pittsburgh. He falls in with a younger, goofier vagabond named Francis (Al Pacino)—though Max, disdainful of the feminine first name, takes to calling him Lion. On the road, they scrape together a rough existence out of scams and handouts, cheap meals and cheaper bars, always with an eye toward that surefire fresh start out east.
This is, in a sense, the definitive Hackman performance. From the way he ostentatiously chomps on an ever-present cigar (and often has trouble lighting it) to the ratty notebook that contains his business plan, Max is that quintessential Hackman character: the self-deluded cock of the walk. In many of his movies, Hackman’s roosters can back it up, but in his best performances—here, The French Connection, Night Moves, Unforgiven, to a degree The Royal Tenenbaums—he wears a shit-eating grin, and has to actually eat shit.
Consider Scarecrow’s bravura final scene. Still trying to get to Pittsburgh, with Lion now tragically left behind, Max stands in a train station counting out the $27.95 needed for a ticket. When he falls short, he starts counting again, as if he can will more bills to appear. After the teller asks him to step aside for the next customer, he pulls off his boot, cuts open the heel, and pulls out a $10 bill, handing it to her with that grin. Max has hit rock bottom, but he thinks he’s won.
Pacino—seeming much younger than he did the previous year in The Godfather—gives Scarecrow a tender soul. Lion is a nerdy little clown, given to awkward pantomime, but he has a spine even in the face of Max’s bluster—insisting that he and Max take a detour to visit the child he abandoned years before. After a bar fight lands the two in a Colorado prison farm for a month, where Lion is assaulted, a deep sadness seeps into Pacino’s performance. A light goes out—very likely for good.
If these grungy guys endure real hardships—some of their own making and some not—their world nonetheless contains bursts of beauty. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) opens the movie with a stunner of a shot, with Max walking down a hill of golden grass against a looming dark sky. (His back is to the bad news, as usual.) Zsigmond concludes the extended opening sequence—where Max and Lion first meet as competing hitchhikers—with something of a miracle, managing to darken the landscape, as if the screen was fading out, while not losing the glow of the sky.
Scarecrow was directed by Jerry Schatzberg (who previously worked with Pacino on The Panic in Needle Park) from a script by Garry Michael White. He brings a looseness to each scene that’s fitting for the story, without letting the narrative as a whole become unfocused or undisciplined. Fred Myrow contributed the drunken, Fat Tuesday score. Scarecrow doesn’t often get mentioned among the great films of the 1970s, but it deserves a place in the conversation. Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t imagine the decade without it.
(3/22/2025)
