Scarface Friend CostumeScarface Movie Review Film Summary 1. Me, I want whats coming to me. Whats coming to you The world, Chico, and everything in it. Tony Montana in ScarfaceBrian De Palmas Scarface rises or falls with Al Pacinos performance, which is aggressive, over the top, teeth gnashing, arm waving, cocaine snorting, scenery chewing and brilliant, some say, while others find it unforgivably flamboyant. What were Pacinos detractors hoping for Something internal and realistic Low key The Tony Montana character is above all a performance artist, a man who exists in order to gloriously be himself. From the films opening shots, in which he is one more disposable Cuban ex con in a Florida detention center, his whole drive is to impress his personality and will on others. He begins with no resources or weapons, except for his bravado, and fakes out more powerful men simply by seeming dangerous and resourceful. His act is a bluff, so there is no sense in underplaying it. Advertisement. Montana is one of the seminal characters in modern American movies, a character who has inspired countless others. If the crime expert Jay Robert Nash is correct, and American gangsters learned how to talk and behave by studying early Hollywood crime movies, then Scarface may also have shaped personal styles. There is even a documentary on the new Scarface DVD about the movies influence on hip hop performers. The movie has been borrowed from so often that its difficult to understand how original it seemed in 1. Latino heroes were rare, when cocaine was not a cliche, when sequences at the pitch of the final gun battle were not commonplace. Just as a generation raised on The Sopranos may never understand how original The Godfather was, so Scarface has been absorbed into its imitators. It takes the name and some of the story structure from Howard Hawks famous Scarface 1. Scarface Friend' title='Scarface Friend' />This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Scarface Friend NamePaul Muni and inspired by the life of Al Capone. Both movies were assailed for their violence, both are about the rise and fall of a criminal entrepreneur, both characters are obsessed with their sisters, and both die because they used their own product in Montanas case, cocaine in the case of the syphilitic Capone, prostitutes. This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Scarface. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the. But the De Palma movie is not a remake in any conventional sense it takes a familiar story arc, which may even contain echoes of Macbeth, and uses it to look at a new character in a new terrain the Florida of the early 1. Fidel Castro briefly allowed large scale immigration from his island, sending us boatloads of his tired and weary masses and seizing the opportunity to empty his jails at the same time. Some of the early footage is documentary, showing news coverage of the arriving refugees and speeches by Castro explaining how he was happy to be rid of counter revolutionary elements. Tony Montana, broke and a criminal, will do anything to get started in the new land, and quickly hustles a commission to kill a fellow prisoner who is disliked by a wealthy Cuban American. The payoff will be citizenship. I kill a communist for fun, he says, but for a green card, I gonna carve him up real nice. Soon he has become a lieutenant for Frank Lopez Robert Loggia, a South Florida druglord, and from there his rise to power is inexorable. Advertisement. The movie was written by Oliver Stone interestingly, the same man who directed the largely laudatory documentary Command ante 2. Castro. Stone has always been at home with stories involving men, drugs, sex and violence, and his work here has a fierce energy it is possible to see Montana reflecting Stones own drive to success. His screenplay, like Ben Hechts work for the earlier Scarface, is filled with quotable lines All I got in my life is my balls and my word, and I dont break them for nobody. Stone shows a certain toughness in not trying to soften Montana, who remains a snake from beginning to end when he gives his mother 1,0. Who did you kill for thisFor Al Pacino, the role was an opportunity to explore a crime boss who is the polar opposite of his Michael Corleone in Coppolas The Godfather. Corleone is slick and smooth, intelligent and strategic Montana is instinctive, impulsive and reckless. The Godfather was made in 1. Scarface in 1. 98. Pacino and De Palma worked together on Carlitos Way, where Pacino plays a Puerto Rican criminal who for a time tries to go straight. His sadder and wiser Carlito, seen with psychological realism, helps us understand how many deliberate acting choices went into the creation of Tony Montana. Though a busy performance, its not a mannered one, meaning that its completely controlled, Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times on the films first release. Scarface shows a man who wants the world, and at one point even sees The World Is Yours blinking at him from the Goodyear blimp. The world for him includes the possession of a desirable woman, and from the moment he sees the blond, slender Elvira Michelle Pfeiffer, he determines that he must have her. She is Franks mistress, but soon Frank is dead, and his mistress and his business belong to Tony. That he must have her is clear, but what he intends to do with her is not there is no romance between them, no joy, and they have two scenes one with Tony in a swimming pool and the other in a vast bathtub where her boredom is palpable. Shes along for the drugs. Tony is much more interested in his sister Gina Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, although his incestuous desires are deflected into a determination to keep all other men away from her. This leads him eventually to the murder of Manolo Steven Bauer, his closest friend. Ginas response to his jealousy is so horrifyingly direct Is this what you want, Tony that it shows she knows exactly who he is and what buttons she can push. AdvertisementScarface is an example of Brian De Palma in overdrive mode. Like Tony Montana, he isnt interested in small gestures and subtle emotions. His best films are expansive, passionate, stylized and cheerfully excessive, and yet he has never caved in to the demand for routine action thrillers. Even his failures Snake Eyes are at least ambitious. Atmosphere Deluxe New Version Serial. There is a mind at work in a De Palma picture, an idea behind the style, never a feeling of indifferent vulgarity. His most recent film, Femme Fatale 2. Cannes Film Festival. That the movie was not more successful is an indictment of the impatience of todays audiences, who want to be assaulted, not seduced. A film like Scarface is more to their liking, which accounts for the films enduring popularity, even in an edited for TV version that emasculates it. The movie has a headlong energy, hurtling toward its grand guignol climax. The cinematography, by the great John A. Alonzo, gloriously magnifies the icons in Tonys life the mansion, the toys, the lifestyle and then closes in on small, tight compositions as Tonys world shrinks. One of the movies best scenes shows Tony at a nightclub, drunk, drugged and exhausted and heartbroken, we sense, because he has gained the whole world but knows he has not merely lost his soul, but perhaps never had one. The music is by Giorgio Moroder, whose impersonal synthesized techno pop provides the correct tone for a lifestyle that has the surface of luxury but not the comfort. And then it all comes around to Pacino. What a complete actor this man is.