Scarecrow

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