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.

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

9:00 am
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.

Notorious

Dir. Alfred Hitchcock
102 min

In the first of our new Film Studies series, Ingrid Bergman is pimped out by US agent Cary Grant to Nazi-sympathizer Claude Rains (ironically the most likeable character in the film). Hitchcock's classic is a prime example of classic Hollywood star power.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

All About Eve

Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz
138 min

Arguably the best backstage melodrama of them all, this story of a young actress on the make seems to have been dipped in acid before the cameras rolled. Bette Davis is the uncomfortably peaking diva Margo Channing and it's her finest role.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Sunset Boulevard

Dir. Billy Wilder
111 min

Hollywood on Hollywood: the tale of a screenwriter, Joe Gillis (William Holden), who stumbles into the orbit of a now-forgotten movie star, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), and realizes this silent film diva could be his meal ticket.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

A Double Life

Dir. George Cukor
104 min

In this fascinating lesser known George Cukor picture matinee idol Roland Colman plays a quintessentially English classical theatre actor, Tony John, whose dedication to playing Othello on Broadway leads to jealous fits off-stage.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Red River

Dir. Howard Hawks
133 min

Mutiny on the Bounty out on the range. Cattle driver Tom Dunson (John Wayne) is a pioneer, a self-made man who sees no reason to trust anyone but himself. In just his second film, Method man Montgomery Clift is Dunson's adopted son Matt Garth.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

12 Angry Men

Dir. Sidney Lumet
96 min

12 strangers (all of them white men) deliberate on the likelihood that a Puerto Rican teenager murdered his father. It's an open-and-shut case for 11 of them. But Juror 8 (Henry Fonda) is not convinced.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

The Heiress

Dir. William Wyler
115 min

Olivia de Havilland won the Oscar for playing Catherine, a shy and insecure young woman who blossoms under the courtship of handsome gentleman caller Morris (Montgomery Clift). Her wealthy father, Ralph Richardson, looks on with severe skepticism.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

A Place in the Sun

Dir. George Stevens
122 min

George (Montgomery Clift) takes a job in his uncle's firm. But before he can break into the family's charmed inner circle and fall in love with socialite Angela (Elizabeth Taylor), he becomes embroiled with a factory girl (Shelley Winters).

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

A Streetcar Named Desire

Dir. Elia Kazan
122 min

"I don't want realism. I want magic!" declares Blanche du Bois, the tragic heroine who meets her nemesis in her sister's husband, Stanley Kowalski, in Tennessee Williams' great play. Brando's performance as Stanley is a turning point in American acting.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

On the Waterfront

Dir. Elia Kazan
108 min

Marlon Brando's definitive performance as Terry Malloy, a New York dockworker (and once a promising boxer) who loses faith in his union and his smarter but corrupt older brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) after a whistleblower is murdered.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre