United States, 1973
Directed by Jerry Schatzberg
With Al Pacino (Francis Lionel Debucchi), Gene Hackman (Max Milan)
A tall and strong man, looking definitely unswerving and forbidding, walks down a hill briskly and reaches a fence made up of barbed wire. He tries hard to pass through the wires without scratching already shabby clothes. The camera lingers on his bumbling effort which makes his face scrawling in long shots but then the editing cuts to a medium shot clearly taken from a closer spot and showing another man perched in a tree, watching the wanderer with amusement. This new character, once the first one has managed to hit again the road – but only after falling in a ditch – manifests himself and appears in full on the screen. He is a smaller, thinner, and younger traveler. His attempt to get friendly are contemptuously dismissed by the other who obviously does not want any traveling companion.
This buddy movie, which is also a road movie through the 1970s United States, is blatantly off a bad start as the shot compositions and the body language highlight immediately the gap between the two men. How could it be bridged to get the story? At first it seems the match the younger guy, Francis Lionel Debucchi, offers to lit the cigar of the older, Max Milan, whose Zippo no longer works, is enough for the latter to embrace the former. The following scenes show them walking down an endless strip of a road, traveling in trucks, chatting and eating in a café. A conversation in the rundown room of a hotel keeps underlining the gap that remains between them even while they move inside the same tight frame. But its conclusion gives unexpectedly more information and more revelation. A still grumpy but more laid back Max tells Francis he sticks with him first because he was aware the proffered match was the last one the guy had and then because he really enjoys the quirky humor, absurd jokes, disarming antics Francis displays from the start.
As the film takes a look at America and friendship through an unconventional point of view, by drifting along two men whose lives so far have been disconnected from the rest of us, Max being released from jail after six years and Francis having quit his job of sailor after a five years stint, the relation it examines is mainly built by Francis around a viewpoint that challenges both Max and staider and more common ideas. It is encapsulated in his funny story about scarecrows and crows giving the film a title and the relationship a deeper meaning, even if Max first dismisses the tale as too dumb. If crows do not raid the fields it is because they laugh at the scarecrow, that funny idea the humans came up with to keep them at bay, and not because such a poor contraption really scares them. So to laugh and more importantly to make laugh is the best way to get over despair and adversity and to forge bonds – according to Francis.
In a way, the film is the chronicle of how Max learns this astonishing lesson. It takes time to acknowledge the worth of Francis’ point and to practice the idea – time spent at an old friend’s place and, after flirting with her business partner, again in jail, in the wake of a brawl with the lady’s former partner that turned a street corner into a mess, or on the road. Time is filled with trivial anecdotes taking up on an epic scale on the screen as their many, sometimes surprising, often alluring, details are captured by the camera to convey the sheer vividness and fieriness driving forward, through thick and thin, for the better and the worse (often for the worse actually) both buddies. Trouble is, Max remains an angry man, prone to scowl, to scorn, and to scuffle. He keeps cutting all along a boorish and bearish figure hard to mellow and to tame. So Francis keeps struggling, big smile on his lips, to change what is supposed to be more than an accidental traveling companion, but in fact a future business partner for a car washing venture in Pittsburgh, the odd goal Max stubbornly clings to no matter what – and despite the obvious fact he is not really the manner born.
But another trouble becomes soon clear: if Max, as he right away confesses, never trusts fully folks, Francis may be too trustful. The time spent in a Colorado jail shapes up fast as a traumatic experience as the tough and cunning guy running the show in the cells, aided and abetted by corrupt wardens, wants to sleep with the smiling and gentle newcomer. Things are not going to be really the same after another string of brawls. It is not just the nice-looking face of Francis is bruised and would display scars for the rest of the film. The shock to find out what happened to him compels Max, who has been sulking, blaming his partner for this coming back to jail quite unfairly, lapsing into his ingrained contempt of folks and distrust of amity, to reach out to Francis. This is not only about getting revenge – it is about connecting again. And learning the lesson for good too, as evidenced by one of the most amazing and hilarious strip shows cinema has recorded and Max’s recognition of Francis as more than a pal, a “taughter”, a true teacher in his own way.
A bigger tragedy is in the offing. Francis wants to go to Denver to meet the kid he never saw but got with a girlfriend he left for sailing the oceans. This is where the scarecrow theory would stop working and where it would be obvious that connection can be a failure. To catch early in the film Max’s attention, Francis used his hands to pretend he is making a call, behaving like a phone operator and a real person speaking on the phone. Much later Max would imitate his teacher, gestures pointing to another imaginary phone call that this time gets through – the world has changed at last a little, well, at least the part both navigate. But what about the wider one?
To make a call in the street means stepping into a phone booth: visually it is already an omen, as Francis no longer looks like a free agent roving within spaces wide or confined but like a frozen figure trapped in glasses and metal bars. The conversation with his former lover would be real but nasty and depressing, hitting the wall of anger and resentment, harsh feelings Francis has always wanted to dismiss but driving the girl, who goes as far as telling a shocking lie. Francis would never recover from the talk and the friendship would end at the gates of an asylum then in a bus station. There are emotions and experiences a cheerful and lively view of life could never get over.
No happy ending, thus, not the one hoped for by an audience who have been on a learning curve too, trying to relate to these drifters, one hopelessly obnoxious, the other hard to take seriously, both with fuzzy plans for the future in a society valuing serious commitments to work, family, nation, trying to enjoy their quirks, trying to like their weaknesses. Life, anyway, can be that wicked. But it is also about the New Hollywood spreading its wings, from Bob Rafelson to Francis Coppola, a new way to shoot – everything in the streets, in the real life, on the fly, John Cassavetes being also a teacher, unless it was Dennis Hopper. This is another stunning, visually arresting, emotionally gripping instance where American filmmakers deal in the rawest terms, which do not exclude a stylistically sophisticated approach, with the messier, grubbier, grimmer, sadder side of a nation where counterculture is running on empty while the cupboards are filled with fresh skeletons, from an imperial presidency to a dirty war to the crash of an industrial world.
This ballad of losers still reckoning to end up on the sunny side of the street, smile on the face, twinkle in the eyes, is a wonderful tale of human warmth and energy flowing from one body to another, from the bottom of life to the highs of love. The actors’ amazing physical and emotional performances and how they get framed are a terrific show of cinematic observation and compassion. The by-product of some twenty great years in photography, director Jerry Schatzberg’s work is remarkably precise and powerful, his visual flair and vivid closeups enhanced by the subtle cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond, while he prods actors Gene Hackman and Al Pacino into working as freely and daringly as possible, injecting impressive zest and emotion into their characters and producing in the process some of their best performances ever.