VHS TRILOGY FINALE: SCARECROW

THE FINAL FILM IN AN EPIC VHS JOURNEY TO THE EARLY 1970s  

*TRIGGER WARNING: SCARECROW CONTAINS A SCENE OF SEXUAL ASSAULT*  

VHS, in its heyday, was the best way to watch movies. They opened up a generation to movies previously impossible to see if they weren't circulating in movie theaters years and decades after release. You could argue our current nerd culture, where everybody has seen everything, was kickstarted by GEN X getting their hands on previously obscure movies.  A lot of transfers of older movies to VHS were crappy. Available film prints were Paleolithic, compression was an issue,  and, frankly, studios did not care how they looked when monetizing their libraries; Too dark, pan-and-scanned, color resolution sometimes bordering monochromatic. But in 2022 it IS a visual  aesthetic filmmakers try to replicate to give their films a grimy, unwashed and somehow dangerous feel. 

Our impromptu trilogy of films we watched on VHS comes to a close with Jerry Schatzberg's sadly neglected vagabond road trip masterwork, SCARECROW (1973), with GENE F*CKING HACKMAN and AL G*DDAMN PACINO in their primes. Like our previous two films in this series (BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA and FAT CITY), Scarecrow was made at a time when studios (in this case, Warner Brothers) had no idea what the kids wanted to see.  A riff on the themes in super successful films Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, featuring two of the biggest stars of the time actually sounds like a no-brainer.

Scarecrow is about two vagabonds with big plans that team up to drift from California to Pittsburgh (with a detour in Detroit). Hackman has never been so lived-in with a role that he always considered a favorite and Pacino is a revelation of warmth and humor, also in a role he often cites as a favorite. We get into the plot on the episode and discuss what happened to this film to have two of the biggest stars of the era, be a great movie, and all but disappear.  It is so good its cult status is understandable but why did it fail upon its release?

Director Jerry Schatzberg was a highly regarded photographer in the 1960s that became an even more highly regarded fashion and celebrity portrait photographer before trying his hand at film.  He'd worked with Pacino in Panic at Needle Park a few years earlier with Pacino (a street-level heroin addiction drama adapted by... JOAN DIDION and JOHN GREGORY DUNNE.  

So we watched three movies on VHS released between 1972 and 1974. What was in the water? What changed in movies that have made all three cult favorites rather than films we see on cinema montages? We'll get into that and the great era of 70s studio filmmaking that was gone almost before it started,

Another grimy, gorgeously depressing early 1970s film perfect for rewatch on VHS. Whoever invented pan-and-scan for VHS owes everyone involved with Scarecrow an apology.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

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