Word: schatzberg
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SCARECROW directed by JERRY SCHATZBERG Screenplay by GARRY MICHAEL WHITE...
...dress in layers of clothing, ragged protective armor that Max sheds in a perilously symbolic striptease. It will not do for White to have Lion just freak out; he must grow blank and rigid right on the stone paws of a lion that decorates a Detroit fountain. Director Schatzberg (The Panic in Needle Park, Puzzle of a Downfall Child) bats out these sorry epiphanies and maudlin metaphors with the eager aplomb of a rookie swatting fungoes...
This movie shares one problem with another new film about dope called The Panic in Needle Park. Both Mutrux and Jerry Schatzberg, who directed Needle Park, are too much absorbed by the mechanics of addiction. They include lengthy and excessive footage of dope, needles, veins and various techniques of shooting. Mutrux and Schatzberg understand well enough the conditions of hard doping, but they do not adequately suggest the causes...
...Schatzberg is an adequate if academic craftsman, but he has spent so much time fussing over the proper visual atmosphere that Needle Park comes out looking more deliberately grubby than spontaneously realistic. Plainly, however, he took a good deal of trouble with his performers. Al Pacino, a New York stage actor making his movie debut, is good, although he has yet to scale down his stage mannerisms to the closer dimensions of films. Kitty Winn performs with meticulous naturalism, and there is a gallery of strong secondary performances, including a nice cameo by Alan Vint as a tough...
Miss Joyce (who also wrote Five Easy Pieces) has a good ear for regional nuances of speech but an unpleasant affinity for glib denouements. Schatzberg betrays his origins as a fashion photographer and commercial director in every fussy shot in the film. Each separate sequence has all the elaborate, artificial, deadening care lavished on it that Schatzberg might have employed on a true-to-life, 30-second TV spot for Gainesburgers...