Lost & Found: 70s Hollywood Back in Cinema

Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg, 1973)

The opening scene of Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow is perfect. On a dusty, tumbleweed-strewn highway in Nowheresville, USA, a burly drifter (Max, played by a typically grizzled Gene Hackman) stumbles out of the bush like a bear with an irritable bowel after its first shit of the day. “I’ve got to tell you something about me,” says Max to Francis (a fresh-faced Al Pacino), the wiry young man he meets on the road. “I’m the meanest son-of-a-bitch alive. I don’t trust anybody. I don’t love anybody. And I can tear the ass out of a God-damned elephant too.” 

Methinks Max doth protest too much. He may be an ogre, but he’s one with the slapstick timing of Buster Keaton, and, like other fictional misanthropes Daffy Duck and Basil Fawlty, the angrier he gets, the funnier he becomes. While perched in a tree, Francis spies the bruiser, who has an unlit stogie dangling from the corner of his mouth and seems to be wearing every bit of clothing he owns, as he blusters across a field. The bright-eyed young man watches with a wry grin (like we in the audience) as Max gets tangled in a wire fence and tumbles down an embankment. Through Schatzberg’s visual shorthand these characters become tangible without a word being uttered. They’re almost mythic; the human equivalent of Aesop’s lion and mouse. Pacino’s character is even nicknamed ‘Lion’ by Max when the curmudgeon decides his name is too flowery. The scene plays out in near silence and by its end the odd couple are fast friends.

This is hardly the first movie of the 70s American new wave to feature a chalk and cheese male friendship that forms on the warm tarmac of the open road. Looking back, it seems like every other film from that decade featured male bonding taking place on the byways and highways of America. Unlike the biker rebels of Easy Rider or the jaded urbanites in Midnight Cowboy, who are ensconced in the late-60s/early-70s counterculture and the post-Vietnam malaise, Max and Francis connection to the period’s psyche is hazy. The pair could be equally at home in Steinbeck or Kerouac’s era. “It doesn’t seem to have aged,” Schatzberg suggests in a recent interview with Sight & Sound. “It could’ve been this year’s film. Maybe I’m being a little proud of it.” Maybe he is, but he’s also right.

Why Scarecrow has remained so little-seen is a bit of a mystery. Superficially it has everything going for it to achieve classic status: it stars two beloved 70s actors on great form; it’s beautifully shot in widescreen by Vilmos Zsigmond, the Hungarian genius responsible for some of the most handsome and iconic films of the decade, including Deliverence, The Deer Hunter and Close Encounters of the Third Kind; and it was one of five American films to pick up the grand prize at Cannes that decade. But unlike those other New Hollywood Palme d’Or-winners (Robert Altman's M.A.S.H, Francis Ford-Coppola's The Conversation, Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now, by Coppola again), Schatzberg and his film have been relegated to footnotes of the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls era. 

One suspects a reason Scarecrow never quite flew in the way its contemporaries did is that Schatzberg’s approach is slightly off-kilter. Its plot meanders, as road movies tend to do, but the former photographer's film goes off road more than most – a twenty minute episode where Max and Francis find themselves banged up in a working prison after a bar brawl feels like a short film in itself that could be justifiably snipped to give the film more propulsion. There’s also a sentimental quality too that’s at odds with the spiky tone of 70s Hollywood. A shot of an abandoned child’s table lamp is a contender for the corniest symbolic use of an inanimate object since rosebud turned to ash at the end of Citizen Kane. It’s these quirks, however, that give the film its freewheeling energy and idiosyncratic tone. Peter Biskind, American cinema’s unofficial biographer, reckons this is second tier New Hollywood. He couldn’t be more wrong. [Jamie Dunn]

The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1975)

Two years after enjoying great success with Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson reteamed with director Bob Rafelson to make the unusual character study The King of Marvin Gardens. The film has now largely slipped from the collective memory of that decade – just as Rafelson is rarely mentioned alongside the era’s leading directorial lights – but perhaps it does a better job than some more celebrated works of encapsulating what made that period in American film so special. It presents us with complicated individuals and then allows us into their relationships, trusting that the audience will be engaged and intelligent enough to hang around with these thorny characters and fill in the gaps for ourselves.

Of course, it helps that the opening scene is so arresting. The monologue Nicholson delivers as late-night radio host David Staebler is one of his most impressive pieces of acting, as he invests his retelling of a childhood memory with an extraordinary emotional weight. This is one of Nicholson's most restrained performances. David is bookish, awkward and quiet while Bruce Dern, as his brother Jason, delivers the kind of charismatically showy performance that Nicholson would later make his specialty. As dangerously charming conman Jason tries to persuade his reluctant brother to join him in a new business venture, the unpredictable dynamic between these two contrasting figures is fascinating to observe.

Instead of a clear narrative through line, The King of Marvin Gardens is loosely structured around a series of scenes and set-pieces, which gives the film an odd and occasionally baggy rhythm. This may have been one of the reasons for its poor reception at the time of its original release, but what's remarkable about the film is the way Rafelson uses both the comical and more melancholy moments to reveal more about the characters and the central theme. One of the best sequences in the film occurs when the brothers take over an empty arena to stage an impromptu Miss America contest in front of a non-existent audience. The delusion and hollowness of the American dream has rarely been so starkly exposed, with László Kovács' cinematography accentuating the coldness and desolation of off-season Atlantic City to brilliant effect. While Nicholson and Dern are undoubtedly the film's stars, it also provides a great showcase for Ellen Burstyn and Julia Anne Robinson as the two women in Jason’s life. In particular, Burstyn's initially shrill performance becomes more troubling and vital as the film nears its tragic finale.

The King of Marvin Gardens may not be an entirely successful film, but that doesn’t really seem to matter. The film is all the more interesting for its inconsistencies and surprises, and it proudly displays the abrasive edges that would be gradually smoothed away by the industry as the 70s turned into the 80s and the spirit of adventure that characterised the previous decade was finally curbed. Perhaps one day we will see another American film revolution, but until that day comes we need to keep revisiting this golden age, where there are lost gems aplenty waiting to be rediscovered and celebrated anew. [Philip Concannon]

Six Other 70s films itching to be rereleased:

McCabe & Mrs Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) – Starring Warren Beatty as a man who thinks he knows what he’s doing and Julie Christie as the woman who really does, Robert Altman’s western is one of the director’s most perfectly realised films. Visually striking and beautifully complemented by the mournful tones of Leonard Cohen, the film grows sadder and more meaningful with every passing year. [PC]

Handle with Care (Jonathan Demme, 1977) – Demme is American cinema’s great humanist director and in 1977’s Handle with Care (aka Citizen’s Band) he’s at his most optimistic and open hearted. In it he imagines a band of truckers and CB radio enthusiasts who form a makeshift community on the wide open highway. If the New Hollywood was, as Robert Kolker suggested, a ‘cinema of loneliness,’ this freewheeling love-letter to the shabby motels and rundown diners of the mid-west, and the people who frequent them, needs its own new classification: a cinema of togetherness. [JD]

Smile (Michael Ritchie, 1975) – Released in the same year as Nashville, this ensemble drama plays out on a much smaller scale but it is no less incisive in its skewering of the hypocrisy behind the pageantry and fixed grins of the Young Miss America Contest. As Big Bob Freelander, Bruce Dern gives one of his finest performances, and the perennially underrated director Michael Ritchie finds great humour in his characters without condescending to them. [PC]

The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, 1971) – May’s masterpiece may be a comedy, but it’s as grueling a watch as anything from the New Hollywood canon. Written by Neil Simon, it concerns a young newlywed couple on honeymoon. The bride is walking on air, but the groom (Charles Grodin) has been regretting the marriage from the moment he said “I do.”  For 90 toe-curling minutes we watch as he tries to woo a college-aged cheerleader (Cybill Shepherd) who’s holidaying at the same resort with her family. May’s genius is that she manages to keep us rooting for Grodin’s narcissistic creep throughout, even as his deception becomes more despicable. [JD]

Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975) – Gene Hackman plays a man called Harry who finds himself lost in an investigation, the full tragedy of which only reveals itself when it is far too late. While that précis accurately describes The Conversation, it also works for Arthur Penn's brilliant noir. Hackman is magnificent as the increasingly disillusioned detective. “I didn't solve anything,” he wearily states at one point, “It just... fell in on me.” [PC]

Wise Blood (John Huston, 1979) – Veteran director John Huston had a great burst of creativity in the 70s. Fat City (1972) and The Man Who Would Be King (1975) have become two of his most celebrated films, but somehow Wise Blood slipped through the cracks. Starring a never better Brad Dourif, it’s one of cinema’s most potent investigations into the power of religion. Would make a great double-bill with last year’s The Master. [JD]