Skip to main content
Scarecrow film image; man smoking while sitting against a tree with a fire warning sign on it

Something of a forgotten film despite the high-powered pairing of Gene Hackman and Al Pacino and winning the top prize at Cannes, this bittersweet, touching buddy movie casts the former as a volatile tramp, Max, an ex-con who dreams of opening a car wash, and the latter as “Lion”, a drifter now set on returning to the wife and kid he abandoned years ago. The ravishing cinematography is by the great Vilmos Zsigmond. For a long time Hackman singled this one out as his personal favourite (and his striptease scene is one for the ages).

Director Jerry Schatzberg is still with us, at 97. A great still photographer, he shot the Bob Dylan album cover, Blonde on Blonde and iconic images of Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda, Fidel Castro and many others.

 

Aug 8: Intro by Marc Staehling, broadcaster

 

The passing years have proven Scarecrow’s continuing appeal as a low-key character study, a downbeat ode to the downtrodden, an elegy for the American dream gone sour. Schatzberg and DP Vilmos Zsigmond craft a visually rich and evocative film as attuned to the rhapsodic vistas of the American pastoral as it is to the squalid dive bars and inhumane work farms that provide the grungy backdrop for screenwriter Garry Michael White’s loose-limbed drama… Both actors deliver career-defining performances.

Budd Wilkins, Slant magazine

Scarecrow is simply a masterpiece of the American new wave, a rangy, freewheeling tragi-comedy in which Hackman and Pacino give effortlessly charismatic performances. The guys ride the boxcars; they get drunk and laid and into trouble. They even wind up in prison – briefly. And their chaotic, fragile friendship is all that they have. This is a jewel of American cinema.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Hollywood movies have rarely spoken such tough and tender truths.

Keith Uhlich, Time Out

Director

Jerry Schatzberg

Cast

Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, Dorothy Tristan, Ann Wedgeworth, Eileen Brennan, Richard Lynch

Credits
Country of Origin

USA

Year

1973

Language

English

Awards

Grand Prix (Palme d’Or), Cannes Film Festival

19+
112 min

Book Tickets

Friday August 08

8:00 pm
Guests/Q&As Hearing Assistance
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Book Now

Sunday August 10

2:30 pm
Hearing Assistance
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
Book Now

Credits

Screenwriter

Garry Michael White

Cinematography

Vilmos Zsigmond

Editor

Evan A. Lottman

Original Music

Fred Myrow

Production Design

Albert Brenner

Also in This Series

Getting Real charts the evolution of screen acting in American film from 1945-1980, diving into the psychological realism which took audiences somewhere deeper and more authentic than ever before.

Little Big Man

Dir. Arthur Penn
139 min

Dustin Hoffman ages a century in Arthur Penn's epic picaresque anti-western, the tall tale of 121-year-old Jack Crabb, a white man rescued and raised by the Cheyenne, a one-time snake-oil salesman, gunslinger, and mule skinner under General George Custer.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Husbands

Dir. John Cassavetes
142 min

Men behaving badly: reeling from the death of a friend, three middle-aged buddies go on an epic drinking binge. It's not enough. They roll home, collect their passports, and take off for a weekend of gambling, women and booze in London.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
Nashville
Nashville film image; large group of people posing by a podium

Nashville

Dir. Robert Altman
159 min

With 26 actors getting more-or-less equal screen time and half of them singing their own tunes, Robert Altman's state-of-the-nation satire on bicentennial USA is a movie that repays multiple views.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Scarecrow

Dir. Jerry Schatzberg
112 min

A bittersweet, touching buddy movie with Gene Hackman as a volatile tramp, Max, and Al Pacino as "Lion", a drifter now set on returning to the wife and kid he abandoned years ago. Hackman's favourite of his own movies.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

The Godfather

Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
175 min

A family saga in more senses than one, Francis Coppola's enthralling gangster opus aims to chronicle the American experience through the twentieth century. It is both a success story and a study of moral corruption.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

The Missouri Breaks

Dir. Arthur Penn
126 min

This exuberant, wild and wooly western from Arthur Penn features a brazenly transgressive performance from Marlon Brando, while Jack Nicholson underplays masterfully as the cattle rustler he's been hired to eliminate.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Raging Bull

Dir. Martin Scorsese
129 min

In the throes of a near-fatal drug problem Martin Scorsese made what he believed could be his last movie. Its subject: the Bronx Bull, Jake La Motta, a graceless but indomitable boxer who never quits beating himself up. De Niro has never dug deeper.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema