Scarecrow (1973 film)

Scarecrow is a 1973 American road comedy-drama film directed by Jerry Schatzberg and starring Gene Hackman and Al Pacino. The story involves the relationship between two men who travel from California seeking to start a business in Pittsburgh.

At the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, the film tied for the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film (now Palme d'Or), the highest honor, with Alan Bridges' The Hireling.

Plot

Two vagabonds—Max Millan, a short-tempered ex-convict, and Francis Lionel "Lion" Delbuchi, a childlike former sailor—meet on the road in California and agree to become partners in a car-wash business when they reach Pittsburgh. Lion is traveling to Detroit to see a child whom he has never met and make amends with the child's mother, Annie, to whom he has sent all of the money that he had earned while at sea. Max agrees to take a detour on his way to Pittsburgh, where the bank to which Max has been sending all his seed money is located.

While visiting Max's sister in Denver, the pair's antics land them in a prison farm for a month. Max blames Lion for their incarceration and shuns him. Lion is befriended by an inmate named Riley, who eventually tries to sexually assault and physically ravage him. When Lion resists, Riley beats him, breaks his teeth and blinds him in one eye, which emotionally traumatizes him. Max rekindles his friendship with Lion and becomes his protector, eventually exacting revenge by fighting Riley.

After their release, Max and Lion continue to have a profound effect on each other, although they have both undergone personal transformations, and their roles have shifted. Lion is still traumatized, no longer carefree nor able to smile, and Max loosens his high-strung aggression, performing a mock striptease to defuse a fight at a bar and make Lion laugh again.

When Max and Lion finally arrive in Detroit, Lion finds a payphone and calls Annie, now married to another man and raising Lion's five-year-old son. Annie is still furious with Lion for having abandoned her, and lies that she miscarried their son. Lion is devastated but feigns joy with Max about having a son. Shortly afterward, Lion experiences a psychological breakdown while playing with children in a city park, and becomes catatonic. Max makes a promise to Lion, now in a psychiatric hospital, that he will do anything to help him and boards a train to Pittsburgh with a round-trip ticket.

Cast

Production

thumb|[[Gene Hackman accompanied Al Pacino in disguise as beggars to develop the performances.]]

Warner Bros. approved the project, looking for a small-budget film after executives became less confident in the success of larger projects. Director Jerry Schatzberg's preference for the roles of Max and Lion were Gene Hackman and Al Pacino. Schatzberg had worked with Pacino on The Panic in Needle Park (1971).

To understand their characters, Pacino and Hackman donned costumes and posed as beggars in San Francisco. It also won Best Non-European Film at Denmark's 1974 Bodil Awards. In the U.S., Scarecrow was a box-office bomb.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film three stars out of four, comparing the story to those of Of Mice and Men and Midnight Cowboy, and positively reviewed the performances of Pacino and Hackman, as well as the writing and setting.

In The New York Times, Vincent Canby called Max and Lion "classic drifters" and "marvelously realized characters".

In a review of Scarecrow on its 2013 re-release, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian described the film as "a freewheeling masterpiece", describing Hackman and Pacino as giving "the performances of their lives".

Peter Biskind of Seven Days magazine described the film as of "secondary" significance in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

By 2012, Scarecrow was among the best-reviewed films in Schatzberg's career. Schatzberg recruited Seth Cohen to write a sequel, and a screenplay was completed by 2013.