DVD Tuesdays: Why Scarface Slays Us
I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters
We all know the drill: Sequels are never as good as the originals. And it's true, except when it isn't: That's why I devoted a whole chapter of my book,
Movie Lust: Recommended Viewing for Every Mood, Moment and Reason, over to remakes that defy conventional wisdom, including
Jonathan Demme's
2004 version of
The Manchurian Candidate (1962),
What Price Hollywood (1932) and the musical remake
A Star is Born (1954) and
Brian DePalma's
Scarface, which updated
Howard Hawks' 1932 gangster drama
Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (inspired by the rise and fall of Al Capone) to then-contemporary Miami.
Scarface is newly available in a "Platinum Edition" whose additional features lean heavily to the jokey, reflecting the fact that over the course of some two decades the film has gone from being so shocking that it nearly received an X rating to being a sentimental favorite of gangsta rappers, wanna-be players and
Miami Vice-era nostalgists. The extras include a scoreboard that lets you count the number of times the word "f**k" or variations thereupon are uttered (hint: a lot) and keep track of the bullets fired (a whole hell of a lot), and a montage of especially foul-mouthed scurrilous scenes from the original film in their tidied up TV versions. I leave you to imagine what Tony Montana (
Al Pacino) really said before it was redubbed to "This town is like a great big chicken, waiting to be plucked."
Joking aside, De Palma and screenwriter
Oliver Stone took former newspaperman
Ben Hecht's original screenplay and updated it without changing much more than the names and the locales. Contemporary reviewers all remarked on how much more violent it was than the original, but if you go back to the original reviews of
Scarface: The Shame of a Nation, you'll find that in 1932 it was deemed horrifyingly brutal.
Tony Montana comes to the US as part of the Mariel boatlift, Tony Camonte (
Paul Muni), the antihero of Hawks' film, is an Italian immigrant.
Montana traffics in cocaine, Camonte traffics in alcohol, which was just as illegal in Prohibition-era America. Both claw their ways to the top of criminal empires and fall because they lose sight of the fact that there's always someone younger, hungrier and just as ruthless waiting in the wings.
Camonte and Montana share old-country mothers and near-incestuous relationships with their sisters (respectively
Ann Dvorak and
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). Both films draw an explicit relationship between the ruthlessness of criminal entrepreneurs and businessmen who remain within the bounds of the law (because what they sell is legal) but are equally morally corrupt. Even a detail like Montana's enthusiasm for his "
leetle friend" echoes Camonte's glee at seeing his first Tommy gun: "They got a machine gun you can carry around I gotta get me one of those!"
But there are also distinct thematic differences that reflect the way in which the America of the 1930s had changed by the 1980s. First and foremost, Camonte is a classic immigrant striver who aspires to be part of the American elite he wants to be respected, not looked down on as a peasant with dirty hands and an accent. His origins appear to be working class, not criminal, and he sells bootleg liquor because it's a lucrative business that's open to people like him. For Camonte money is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Montana, by contrast, has contempt for the social elite and their affectations to gentility he's
proud of coming "from the gutter." He doesn't want to be one of the elite: He them to be afraid of him and to feel small by comparison. That's why everything Montana owns has to be the biggest and the best vastest house, most expensive meal, most powerful gun, biggest mound of cocaine, most desirable woman (
Michelle Pfeiffer) and why acquisition of such material signifiers of wealth and power is itself an end. And unlike Camonte, Montana helps precipitate his own downfall by breaking the rule he himself made famous: "Don't get high on your own supply. Camonte never becomes a drunk but Montana winds up a cocaine addict, with all the paranoia and volatility that implies.
Things to consider:
Why has Tony Montana become a perverse role model?
What fuels moviegoers' aparantly insatiable hunger for mafia movies in all their permutations: Irish mafia, Russian mafia and so on?
Are the operations of gangs truly a mirror of American capitalism at its most ruthless?
Are there other remakes you think oare the equal of the films that inspired them?
Remember: Send your movie questions to
FlickChick.
Previous DVD blogs:
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also:
This Week's New DVD Releases
