5 - An Immigrant Filmmaker Substitutes an Alternative Vision of Adolescence: The Scarecrow (Sam Pillsbury, 1982)

Summary

Whereas The God Boy exemplified the type of adaptation that maintains an extreme fidelity to its source, and Sleeping Dogs represented a second type that seeks to rewrite the original, chiefly by importing elements from other cinematic genres in order to transform it into a vehicle for personal expression, the next New Zealand coming-of-age film, Sam Pillsbury's The Scarecrow (1982), demonstrates a third type – the kind of adaptation that suppresses key elements in the source text for the sake of substituting a new vision, or mythos, for that which had informed the original work.

The cinematic version of The Scarecrow was based on the ‘subfusc’ novel of the same name written by Ronald Hugh Morrieson, which was published in 1963. As far as the external events of the fable are concerned, Pillsbury's film adheres closely to Morrieson's novel – at least to outward appearance. The story revolves around a fourteen-year-old boy, Neddy Poindexter (Ned in the film), who lives in a small rural town called Klynham (closely based on Hawera, in the North Island of New Zealand), and the action commences when the hens that Ned and his friend Les are raising get stolen – on the same day, as it turns out, that a serial necrophiliac murderer cuts the throat of a theater usherette in the big city to the south (alias Wellington, in real life). Shortly afterwards, while driving with his father, Ned sees a sinister-looking man at a crossroads, and encounters him again on a train that takes them back to Klynham, his father's jalopy having broken down. This stranger, we learn, is Hubert Salter, the ‘scarecrow’ of the title (on account of his great height, gauntness, and general appearance), who rapidly inveigles his way into the circle of drunks frequented by Ned's Uncle Athol and Charlie Dabney, the undertaker, and eventually into the Poindexter family itself. Thereafter, the story alternates between Ned's trials and tribulations regarding a loutish gang of youths led by Victor Lynch, and Salter's murderous predations in the town, culminating in his pursuit of Prudence, Ned's beautiful sixteen-year-old sister, who, in an outburst of adolescent sexuality, is attracting the attention of a range of men and boys.