Reeling Backward: Scarecrow (1973)

Al Pacino and Gene Hackman did not get along during the making of this rambling road picture, though their characters found a certain harmony as castoffs who each gain a partner.

There’s a lot of mythology and frankly a lot of BS about how the atmosphere on a movie set affects the quality of the final product. Many iconic films reportedly had chaotic or even strife-filled shoots, to the point some showbiz folks actually believe a happy set means the picture is doomed.

Al Pacino and Gene Hackman reportedly did not get along making “Scarecrow.” It wasn’t that the two screen legends didn’t like each other, just that their approach to performance was so different they each left feeling like they hadn’t found the connecting spark. It received zero Oscar or Golden Globe nominations — surprising given their newfound status after “The Godfather” and “The French Connection” — though it did tie for the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year.

It was their only film together, and it didn’t make much of a mark commercially or critically at the time, so both actors looked back on it with something like regret.

As pictures sometimes do, “Scarecrow” has undergone a steady reputational refurbishment over the decades, and it often turns up on lists or articles about underappreciated gems from that era or being one of the best acting jobs of Hackman and/or Pacino’s career.

It’s not.

I can see why the pair — both character actors who became movie stars — felt like they didn’t hit it off. The film very much feels like two men who circle in each other’s orbit without any full-on impact. It has a very loose, improvisational feel that’s filled with a lot of behavior untethered to any kind of storytelling imperative.

These are the sorts of films actors love to make because they’re totally character-driven. The original screenplay by Garry Michael White has only very vague notions about why Max Millan (Hackman) and Francis Delbuchi (Pacino) wind up together or where they’re headed.

Ostensibly their quest is to open a car wash together in Pittsburgh, though it’s a long haul from California for two broke vagabonds, hitchhiking and jumping trains with many stops along the way.

Actually, the business is Max’s personal dream, having recently been released from San Quentin for six years of hard time for some unspecified crime, though almost certainly related to his volcanic temper and eagerness to get into fights. He chooses Francis after the two stumble across each other on the highway, competing for hitched rides, and they just fall in.

Max later admits he chose Francis to be his business partner/friend because he was willing to give up his last match to light Max’s omnipresent cigar.

The two are a study in contrasts. Francis is physically small, younger and goofy. He’s always trying to disarm others by making them laugh. He also was just recently discharged, though in his case having spent the last five years as a sailor (presumably the merchant marines; if he’s been in Vietnam it seems like it would’ve come up). Apparently, he got his girlfriend pregnant while they were just teens, panicked and skedaddled.

He sent all his wages to her to support their child, without even knowing its gender. He has the notion to make his way to Detroit and surprise them. He carries a rucksack and a white gift box with a red bow, inside of which is a child’s lamp, which he figures is a good present for a girl or a boy.

Max looms large, a big man probably in his upper 30s who dresses bizarrely with owlish wire-rim glasses, a pageboy cap, scarf and a long coat under which he wears a comedic number of clothing layers. There’s a couple of scenes where he disrobes and seriously, he’s got like eight or nine shirts on.

He says it’s to keep him warm, but apparently Max is just wearing his entire wardrobe all the time. He even hides his boot behind his pillow on the rare occasions he gets to sleep indoors. This is a man who likes to keep himself to himself.

He resembles an intellectual, except for his pugilistic expression and big, meaty hands, often with one finger stuck out pointing accusingly at whoever he’s currently beefing with. Max is a walking iconoclast, a Bolshevik academic with a dockworker’s roughneck mien.

“You gotta work” is his frequent admonition to Francis, though he seems indifferent to the practice himself.

Max carries a large briefcase and a journal in which he has kept meticulous figures for his car wash enterprise. The seed money he saved while in prison is in a bank in Pittsburgh, which is the reason he is heading there to start things out. As numerous people try to point out to him, the account can be transferred and there are cars — and dirt — everywhere.

It’s hard not to see the glaring thematic similarities to “Midnight Cowboy” from a few years earlier. Even the physical pairing is similar — strapping manly type and squirrelly runt — with Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman matching Hackman and Pacino.

Road pictures were a big thing in cinema around this time, or more generally any kind of movie where the focus was not on plot but putting wayward characters into situations and seeing what happened. “Easy Rider.” “Five Easy Pieces.” “Harry and Tonto.” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” The list goes on.

After stopping in a cafe for breakfast, Max relates his whole plan and recruits Francis as his partner. His controlling behavior is quickly evident, snapping at a fellow diner he thinks is listening in on their conversation. He also informs Francis he doesn’t care for his name, so he will call him by his middle one, Lionel, which often gets shortened to just Lion, a humorous moniker for a shy kid.

“I’m the meanest sumbitch alive. I don’t trust anybody and I don’t love anybody,” Max growls, though somehow we know this is mostly self-protective patter.

And off they go. They work odd jobs from time to time to fund their travels, picking apples or washing dishes. Two stops are planned along the way: to Detroit so Lionel can meet his kid and reconnect with his girl, Annie — played by Penelope Allen, whom Pacino would work with again in “Dog Day Afternoon” — and to Denver so Max can look up his sister, Coley (Dorothy Tristan).

Things are good in Denver. Coley, who runs some kind of combination art studio/junkyard business, immediately takes a shine to Lionel. Max in turn has his eye caught by Frenchy (Ann Wedgeworth), her own friend and partner. It seems like the perfect foursome, and the boys should settle down here permanent, but Max insists they have to move on to Pittsburgh.

Before they do, they get busted in a bar fight. It’s a very weird and humorous sequence, with Lionel somehow acquiring a flame retardant suit and leading everyone in the bar in a conga line while celebrating their brave new business. He even lights a trashcan outside and stands in the flames.

A guy Max had been squabbling with earlier says something that causes him to let loose a haymaker, and the pair wind up at the Colorado Honor Farm, a sort of low-security work prison, for a month.

Max is incensed at Lionel for landing him back in the slammer, ignoring Lionel’s rebuttal that he wasn’t the one who started the fight. Max resolves not to speak to his buddy for their entire stretch, causing Lionel to be taken in by Riley, a shark-like inmate played by Richard Lynch. Riley sets Lionel up with an easy work assignment and promises to make him artistic director of the prison theater troupe, but it’s all a play to get into his pants.

Lionel returns to the bunkhouse absolutely beaten to sh*t, his teeth busted and one eye blinded. Max immediately abandons his stubborn silence, nursing Lionel back to health and making sure to exact revenge on Riley. (Somehow, without getting their sentences extended.)

“Scarecrow” was directed by Jerry Schatzberg, a photographer-turned-director (and onetime paramour of Faye Dunaway) who’s made several notable films including Pacino’s breakout role three years earlier in “The Panic in Needle Park,” “Street Smart,” “Honeysuckle Rose” and “The Seduction of Joe Tynan.”

(At age 98, he’s still with us.)

His M.O. seemed to be just letting his two leads rip and see where each scene would go. The dialogue seems partially improvised and is delivered in un-enunciated mumblings so favored by Method types (which, honestly, I sometimes struggled to understand).

The title comes from an early conversation in which Lionel insists that scarecrows are not scary but ridiculous, and the reason crows steer clear is out of appreciation to the farmer for making them laugh. This perfectly encapsulates his approach to life, playing the fool to get along.

After the trauma of the prison farm, Max appears to finally mellow and even adopts Riley’s approach to conflict. When some meathead at a bar tries to start a fight with him, Max begins acting loonishly and does a striptease of his abundant outfit. It brings the whole place down and Lionel, who had finally been prepared to walk out on Max, gives things another go.

Disaster strikes in Detroit when Lionel finally works up the gumption, with Max’s prodding, to call Annie and let her know he’s in town. Unfortunately, she’s never recovered from his cowardly abandonment of her, even though she’s married now and her son is thriving. She lies and tells Lionel the kid died in childbirth.

At first Lionel elides the truth to Max, literally jumping into his arms with a celebratory shout of, “It’s a boy!” But later, while goofing around with some kids at the James Scott Memorial Fountain, he suffers a psychotic break.

At the mental hospital, Max is told Lionel is catatonic and his recovery uncertain. He tries to shake his friend back to alertness, but glumly gives up and buys a bus ticket to Pittsburgh — $27.95, and Max has to get the last 10 bucks from his squirrel-away in the heel of his boot.

The fact that he buys a round-trip ticket, meaning he intends to return to check on Lionel, is supposed to leave the audience with a small glimmer of hope.

Believe it or not, Schatzberg actually tried to mount a sequel in the 2010s, though it never came to fruition.

I enjoyed finally seeing “Scarecrow,” though in the end it’s a film of sound and fury signifying not much. It’s to be enjoyed for the naturalistic performances and the lackadaisical ambling of these two men.

I still think the film would have worked better if Max and Lionel eventually “got there” — meaning they reached some kind of destination, literal or otherwise, and found themselves carried forward to some new level of being the audience was able to recognize. As it is, “Scarecrow” feels almost like an acting studio exercise, a lengthy skit that’s all about moments rather than momentum.