The Scarecrow

Faced with the problem of turning the printed word into visual images Yon Stroheim, for GREED in 1923, used a method of literal tr~nsfer: page by page, word by word, almost comma by comma.

In his 1935 film of John Buchan's THE 39 STEPS Hitchcock (with Charles Bennett, Alma Reville and Ian Hay) virtually threw away the book and used his imagination. But five years later, with REBECCA, he departed scarcely at all from Daphne du Maurier. By then he was working for David Selznick -whose long string of popular films from literary best-sellers included DA VID COPPERFIELD (1934), A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1935), ANNA KARENINA (1935), THE PRISONER OF ZENDA (1937), THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER (1938) and GONE WITH THE WIND (1939). Box-office hits, all of them; but nobody could claim that a majority of cinemagoers would have read the original novels. Somehow, Selznick and his scriptwriters managed to keep faith with the book while presenting a film acceptable to audiences who were concerned only with enjoying what they ~aw on the screen.

My feeling about THE SCARECROW is that director Sam Pillsbury and his co-writer Michael Heath are closer to Stroheim than they are to Selznick. Obviously they were determined to do justice to Ronald Hugh Morrieson's extraordinary blend of innocence, sexuality, villany, abnor- mality and boredom in a small town environment. If readers of the book are happy with the outcome, some viewers of the film may be left a little in the dark.

Darkness, of course, is very much what the film is, a!! about. Not just the darkness of night time. but darkness of the mind and of the hllman spirit. Where THE SCARECROW is most successful is in its macabre juxtaposition of the twin themes of the virginal and the vile. What gives the film its powerful sense of menacing horror is its contrast between the normal and the bizarre; but, as in the book, even what is norma( is open to question. By a startlingly effective use of chiaroscuro Sam Pillsbury has heightened the melodrama and the sense of looming evil.

Much the same sort of technique that Pillsbury and his lighting cameraman, Jim Bartle, have used in THE SCARECROW was a feature of Selznick's film 'of TOM SAWYER (camerman, James Wong Howe). Mark Twain's story is also concerned with the outwardly uneventual life of young

., ..' -~o