SCARFACE (1983)
Review by Pauline Kael
A DE PALMA MOVIE FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T LIKE DE PALMA MOVIES
by Pauline Kael
Al Pacino’s Tony Montana is small and mean. The slash of a scar that runs through one eyebrow and down across the cheekbone seems to go right to his soul; there’s something dead in his face—as if ordinary human emotions had rotted away, leaving nothing but greed and a scummy shrewdness. As the central character in the new Scarface, directed by Brian De Palma from a script by Oliver Stone, he scrambles up the rungs of the Miami drug world the way that Paul Muni, as an Italian immigrant, climbed to the top of the Chicago bootlegging business in the 1932 Scarface. Modelled on the career of Al Capone, the 1932 film, like the other prototypical gangster pictures—Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, both of 1931—was set during Prohibition. The basic story fits right into the early eighties: the new Scarface is a Cuban, one of an estimated ten thousand inmates of jails and mental institutions whom Castro, having his little joke, deported to the United States in 1980, when President Carter (briefly) opened the doors to Cuban refugees. Tony Montana boils with resentment because other people have a soft life, and more money than he has. “Me, I want what’s coming to me,” he says—”the world and everything in it.’’ He’s an angry, vindictive killer, and he sees America as the land of opportunity.
For the first three-quarters of an hour, the film is garish and intense. With Giorgio Moroder’s synthesizer music pulsating and with shots of the arrival of the “Marielitos” (the Cubans who set out from Mariel Harbor), it feels like the beginning of a new-style, post -Godfather gangster epic—hot and raw, like a spaghetti Western. The swaying movements of music and image suggest a developing delirium. In these lushly ominous early sequences, the-American immigration officers spot Tony for what he is, and they put him and his pal Manolo (Steven Bauer) in a detention camp. We see the sadistic murder that the two of them carry out in order to buy their freedom, and then the first drug deal that Tony handles, which turns into a bloody massacre. These two sequences are planned and edited with staccato, brutal efficiency; De Palma seems to be adapting his techniques to naked melodrama, chain saw and all. (The massacre is awesome—a slapstick comedy of horrors which just goes streaking by.) And our first encounters with the other characters raise our expectations. Frank Lopez, the Hispanic-Jewish kingpin of the Miami drug trade, who takes a fancy to Tony, is like any number of movie producers: as played by Robert Loggia, he’s a big, beefy windbag who enjoys being expansive and handing out paternal advice. Frank’s bored girlfriend, Elvira, a Wasp junkie with silken blond hair and a mannequin’s cool, is played by Michelle Pfeiffer, a funny, sexy beauty who slinks across the screen—she’s the Platonic ideal of classy hooker. And Frank’s henchman, Omar, an anxious pockmarked creep who has a big laugh for his boss’s jokes, is played by the whirlwind F. Murray Abraham; he manages to look like a shark here, and every time he appears in a scene, its energy level jumps.