Gangster Season: Scarface (Dir Brian De Palma, 2h50m, 1983)

 As far back as cinema has been a medium, at least a part of it has wanted to be a gangster. The Early Thirties started them off well, the real-life fascination with those on the other side of the law quickly turning fictional to portray the daring exploits of Tony Carmonte, (Scarface 1932), Tom Powers (The Public Enemy, 1931), and Rico Banndello (Little Caesar, 1931). Sure, there was the thirties and early fortiest, just past that first great era of actual gangsters in the Prohibition era, where the Hays Code said crime didn’t pay, and essentially stopped crooked anti-heroic figures from making good on their ill-gotten gains, only allowing their inevitable downfall.

With that out of the way, the gangster movie exploded back into life-and went international, from the early 1960s onward. From Peckinpah, Penn and Coppola’s early work, and from influences as far apart as noir and crime dramas came Blaxploitation, Latino, the ultra-cool French New Wave crime films, the Italian poliziotteschi, British gangster films, yazuka cinema, and Hong Kong heroic bloodshed exploded out onto the world stage, portraying everything from British heists to fence a duo of shotguns to a pair of brothers coming face to face across the battlefield of gangland Hong Kong, to the one and only Takeshi Kitano, a titan of playing (and indeed directing) the impassive hardman in the middle of a chaotic Yakuza turfwar.

Where better to start our Gangster Season though, than in 1980s Miami, with the ultraviolence and ultra-stylised world of Brian DePalma’s Scarface, (a remake of the 1931 gangster rags-to-riches-to-ruin classic), in which Al Pacino’s fresh off the boat from Cuba small time crook, Tony Montana rises to power in the cocaine industry, winning everything, and showing no mercy, until he is undone by his own arrogance, his own lust for power, and his own morals, and, in perhaps the greatest ending setpiece of the entire genre, takes on a small army before his untimely death. It not only cemented the 1980s idea of the gangster as an extension of the vapid and surface-only zeitgeist of the period, not only turned a critical blowtorch upon the very Hollywood system it was made in, but remains, despite its Peak-80s sheen, a cultural touchstone to rappers and film-makers alike.

Al Pacino looks up at the screen, and sees his next project. The film is Scarface, a cultural touchstone of Pre-Code Hollywood, made by two of its biggest figures of the early 1930s. On the one hand is Howard Hughes, a larger than life figure famed for making big budget (and often controversial) pictures, including the colossal but madly excessive Hells Angels (1930), whilst balancing a love of aircraft and flight and dating practically a “Who’s Who” of Hollywood of that era-no wonder a story of a gangster rising to power appealed to him. On the other was the other Howard, Howard Hawks, perhaps the greatest director to never quite become a household name, who would later go on to direct The Big Sleep, Bringing Up Baby, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and His Girl Friday. Moreover, the two Howards working together was not an altogether obvious pairing, Hughes having sued Hawks for allegedly lifting elements of Hells Angels in Hawks’ film The Dawn Patrol-they eventually agree to work on the film after a game of golf, and cast the versatile Paul Muni as the titular gangster.

The film is a success, portraying both violence and excess with aplomb, with Tony’s lust for power and violence eventually spelling his doom, neatly balanced against its depiction of the American Dream run wild (both themes that will resurface in the remake) and the film even meets the approval of Al Capone (apparently-he was, by this point in prison for tax evasion), an influence on the original novel, but even prior to the more stringent rules of the Hays code, the often brutal (for 1931) killings are a bridge too far, and the film runs foul of public outcry, especially from the Italio-American community, and, despite anti-censorship protests, Hughes vaults the film’s negatives until their recovery after his death in 1976. Al Pacino looks up, and, in place of Muni, he sees...himself. He calls his agent, Martin Bregmann.

Whilst attached to the idea of a straight remake, helmed by the great Sidney Lumet, the trio agree that simply making another Italian 30s-set Gangster movie (Pacino has played Michael Corleone twice by this point) is melodramatic.The idea soon drifts to the new Tony being a Cuban, arriving in the then contemporary Mariel boatlift-which opens the picture-in which hundreds of thousands of Cubans, including many petty criminals, were essentially ejected from the country. Disagreements on the film’s direction and focus, with Lumet wanting a more poliical film, seems him replaced by Brian De Palma, a now mainstay of the mainstream, and a key figure in the arrival of New Hollywood, who will direct, and screenwriter Oliver Stone, who already has Midnight Express (1978), and an Oscar for its screenplay under his belt. Stone is also, at least up until he starts writing the film, in the midst of a battle with cocaine addiction.

Despite being divided by over a half a century of cinema, the two films are much the same. Tony, a thuggish immigrant, arrives off the boat, and soon finds himself involved in organised crime. For Montana, this sequeence lays out the Mariel boatlift with documentary footage. We cut to Tony (Pacino) in a masterful pan around him in the immigrtation centre, where the Cuban small-time crook lies his way through the interview-heavily stacked against him and his countrymen-before his prominent facial scar and prison tattoo give him away, and he is sent to a refuge camp. Settling here, he and his friends are promptly tasked with executing an ex-Castro general on behalf of the local drug lord (Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia). Rewarded for killing the general with Green Cards, a murder that is filmed in a masterfully done and tense chase , Tony and his friends briefly try to find legitimate employment, but are soon, through entanglement with Omar, Frank’s lieutenant (F Murray Abraham), and Tony’s own belief that he is meant for greater things, and thus are pulled back into the world of crime.

It is here that De Palma returns to one of his key cinematic themes, that of the ultra-violence that punctuates his career. Tony and his friends soon find themselves, via Omar’s dealing with Columbians, in the middle of a brutal double-cross. Scarface is not a film that so much meditates upon violence as it does spring it upon us every so often with all the brute force and carnage of a bear-trap; scenes from this film pass into infamy-the chainsaw scene, the helicopter hanging, the brutal and effective offing of Tony’s rivals and competitors, and his final showdown-but here, powerless to stop it, Tony is forced to watch the horrifyingly effective, and almost entirely offscreen murder, of his friend, Angel, by a chainsaw-wielding Columbian manaic. It is a scene as brutally effective, from the spatter of blood and the genuine fear from Tony, to the brutality and pure violence of the sequence.

In the first of many moments of violence begetting more violence-there are nearly fifty on-screen deaths in the film-Tony is only saved from the same fate by his friends, who proceed to gun down the Columbians, with Tony shooting dead his assailant in broad daylight. Tony and his friends’ suspicions against Omar grow, and, cocaine in tow, Tony arranges to hand it over in a meeting with Lopez, at his palatial house in Miami. It is here that the film begins to dwell on its undeniable, and remarkably evocative, celebration of the excess, and pure baroque scale of the cocaine-mountained 1980s. The film is positively drenched in it,knee-deep in cocaine maximalism, from Mordoder’s soundtrack that’s postively snow-blind by how much it evokes the period, to the look and feel of the costumes and locations, a mix of masterful exaggeration and contemporary reportage. Nowhere do we see this better, and nowhere better do we see what Tony is striving towards better than in the life of Lopez. Not only is Lopez’s house spectacularly crass, an over-the-top, surface-level evocation of the decade, materialism red in tooth-and-claw, but, with the arrival of his trophy wife, Elvira (an early role for Michelle Pfeiffer), the vaccuousness, the shallow need for more among the rich, famous and beautiful of Miami and beyond, becomes apparent, and against this, enters Tony Montana.

The film makes one final major addition to itself at this point-whilst Tony Carmonte’s mother and sister are reduced to bit-part players until the second and third act, here, Tony Montana’s estragement from hs mother, his overprotectiveness towards his sister, Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and his connections to crime before leaving Cuba are fleshed out, from the fractious relationship between mother and son that only become starker the next time they cross paths, to the overprotectiveness, and quasi-incestiousness between Tony and Gina that will eventually doom every man she comes across.In one scene it lays bare the darker side of Tony, but also a theme that the second and third act will expand upon. This, alongside several scenes with his lieutenant Manny (Steven Bauer) unsuccesfully attempting to flirt with women, and Tony unsuccessfully flirting with Elvira, and showing perfectly despict how hopelessly inept at anything other than killing and capitalism these men are, stunted by violence and the life of crime they have led.

Here, as Tony is sent to Bolivia alongside Omar to negotiate a deal for cocaine supply, the film essentially rejouns the main beats of the otiginal; Tony essentually trading one mentor figure for another as he agrees a deal with Sosa, a drug lord who runs out of a colossal estate in Bolivia who warns him against betrayal, after offing Omar in brutal fashion, having outed the man as a police informant.. Sosa, for his part, is a wonderfully unpleasant character, brought to life with cool menace by Paul Shenar as a perfect reflection of Tony, an ultra-slick and nigh-unflappable figure who essentially shadows the Cuban’s rise to power from here on out. It is also here, having defied Lopez’s demands, and now able to run his own cocaine empire with what Lopez cannot sell on, that Tony staarts getting unwelcome attention, not only from corrupt cop, Bernstein (Harris Yulin), but from hitmen, who confront the clearly-worse-for-wear Tony, but fail to kill him, to which the enraged Tony responds with meted-out violence, and turns his sights upon those who employed them.

It is here that Tony starts his inevitable rise to power; the death of Lopez and Bernstein is almost matter-of-fact, an inglorious double-execution in almost ctassly two-dimensional spaces, the heightened reality of picture perfect sunsets and flashy aspirational cars around two men, as they are summarily executed by the equally vacuous and aspirational men who follow and build atop their fallen empires. Tony himself has become almost spectacularly emblemtic of the decade, his suits, his surroundings becoming larger than the man who wears and populates them. The murder of his former boss and his police informant only adds to the shallowness of the men; they beg pitifully for their existence from Tony mere hours after they tried to kill him. Their passing, though, is not just a loosing of the restraints on the young upstart, but a wholesale coronation; he soon marries Elvira, and begins to spend as lavishly as his former mentor, the shell company that the group run their drug-running and ever more lavish money-laundering enterprise based in an almost risiably ostentatious building.

We see his life begin to unravel as he chases this materialism, his homelife deterioating in his huge, and ostentatious mansion (an undeniable status symbol and perhaps the largest cultural impact of the entire film, given its recreation by countless rappers), where he, Elvira and Manny essentially drift away from each other, even in the same room-Elvira’s drug habit, Tony’s American Dream writ large placing them as utterly divided figures, the distance only heightened by the way they are physically divided in the shot-Elvira placed in the rear or closeup of shots, Tony, luxuriating in the bath kept midshot, abandoned by his wife, and surrounded by the riches of his preying upon the wealthy and addicted of Miami surrounding him. By the time his marriage has disintegrated around the dining table of an expensive restaurant, and Elvira stormed out on him, this ostentatiousness, this obsession with appearance, with aesthetic, and pure power and money have nigh destroyed Tony as a man, and hollowed him out.

Beneath this conspicious consumption, though, the film begins to explore the yawning void inside Tony-before his attempted murder, we see that dark and posessive side once again take shape, as he follow Gina and her boyfriends from dancing in the nightclub into a bathroom, and attacks both of them, reducing his sister to tears as he accosts her. The scene in which the assassination attempt takes place itself is as once a dawning indication that Tony, like the woman he will marry a few scenes later, is nothing more than a strung-out junkie, drifting through another evening, his reaction of being shot at a more confusion that incredulity, before he eventually leaps into action. It is what comes next though, that begins to undo the colossal empire that Tony has built, his own arrogance and greed breaking his deal with the ban, and forcing him to turn to another money changer that quickly reveals themselves as a FBI sting, and charge Tony with tax evasion.

It is here that the artifice, the idea of Tony Montana begins to crumble-we see his desperation to stay out of jail, to continue to build his empire, even as the rest of his life starts to fall apart, and we see something uglier and more self-serving, the Id of the American dream come forth; Tony picks fights with his best friend and his wife, and loses both of them in one brutally astonishing sequence that severs the two main ties in his life irrecoverably-the woman he has practically centered his entire aspirational dreams around is slated as a junkie, a reflection of just how out of control Tony has become, whilst his best friend, Manny, is dismissed, as Tony roars to the crowd of materialistic middle class Miamiites that he is “the bad guy” that he is the manifestation of everthing that they keep hidden within themselves, and unlike them, that he is unafraid to show it, in a moment of total auto-destruction that prefaces his actual death later in the film. This, undoubtedly is the last time they see the bad guy, the self-made man turned unrepentant villain.

The film offers us one last sense that Tony can turn his life around, his morals finally bursting free for a moment as the deal to save his own skin, involving murdering an activist for Sosa, alongside his henchman, the Shadow, goes south, Tony refusing to let the Shadow blow up his wife and children-however, no sooner has Tony returned to Miami than Sosa has declared war on him, and soon, with his cocaine usage skyrocketing, his avarice growing, and with it his control over his sister all spiralling out of control, he shoots his best friend dead, and as Sosa’s men storm his palacial mansion, is shot by his vengeful sister, only for her to die in the crossfire. Tony follows, despite his valliant final stand, a few minutes later, falling to die beneath the simple, evocative callback that is the words: “The World is Yours”. For a moment, never have they rung truer

Part of Scarface is that of smartly done modern remake, placing Tony back into context at the start of another era of fantastically violent people making fantastically colossal amounts of money selling vice to Middle America. The problem is that much of the film essentially feels like a retread, tather than an update of the original; apart from Tony, Elvira, and Sosa, few seem to have been updated for the yuppie-driven maximalism of the decade, and as a result, this trio seem so much more alive and memorable than the rest of the film. It is, also, undeniably a film in awe of its chosen setting and time period-Moroder’s music seeps through it all like some musical manifestation of the white powder that funds and fuels what seems like every second of the film, its fashion does not so much date it as it repeatedly screams out that it is Nineteen Fucking Eighty Three, and it practically feels like an exorcism to the heart of the America that balked at its violence

Pacino runs this film, dominates it, and for every second that wide Cuban accent is funny, there’s another four where he’s a compelling villanous protagonist, a bogeyman, a drug-pushing, drug addicted off-the-boat ne’erdowell. It may be the choice that the film has had most critique of in recent years-it certainly ran foul of Cubans in the 80s, but Tony Montana, more than Henry Hill, and perhaps more even than that other great gangsterish Tony-Soprano-is the archetypical cinematic gangster. Strip back that colourful 80s shell and Scarface becomes a far more compelling film-remove the artfice and what remains is the stake through the decade’s heart, a brutal invocation of the Id of the American Dream in the form of Al Pacino at his very best, striving for fortune and the height of capitalism on one hand, and holding a semi-automatic in the other. Scarface is the quintessential gangster movie, and despite some dated aspects remains a mainstay of the genre.

Rating: Highly Recommended


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