The List's Paul Dale

All of which makes this brilliant, cold-blooded masterpiece rather a strange proposition at a time when President Obama is opening up relations with the seemingly progressive sibling Raúl Castro. Myth has it that during his time as 46th Vice President of the United States in the Bush era, Dick Cheney liked to spend his downtime staring at a corporately revised map of Cuba which showed which US conglomerate would go where come the day that the US colonise the Caribbean island again. Could it be that Universal has been promised a spec there? A little place in the sun to wait out another Depression? Where multimillion-dollar mergers can be brokered by Skype and movies can be made for a tenth of the price? Could the re-release of Scarface be the beginning of their chainsaw wielding march on Cuba? Either way it’s great to see you again Tony.

What a lovely idea-- over at Make, Sean Michael Ragan shows you step-by-step how to make your very own Tony Montana snow globe. "What's that you say?" asks Ragan in his introduction. "You don't need an 8-inch diameter snow globe? Especially not one featuring a vignette of Al Pacino as Tony Montana in the climactic battle scene from Brian De Palma's Scarface? I say you're wrong: You need one of these. You need one so badly you don't even know it yet."

Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932), in which Paul Muni played a version of Al Capone, is a deserved classic, but the 1983 remake, written by Oliver Stone and directed by Brian De Palma, is even better. For a start, shifting the action to Miami and making Tony Montana an outlaw from Castro’s Cuba is very clever, and it allows Al Pacino to play with a Cuban accent the way a cat teases a dying bird. It was as if all the restraints Pacino had respected to play Michael Corleone were tossed aside. Beyond that, this Scarface is a modern opera (with music by Giorgio Moroder) that builds from the first bloody job on Miami Beach to the assault on Tony’s cocaine palace by Colombian thugs. Along the way, we get deliciously sleazy performances from F Murray Abraham, Harris Yulin and Robert Loggia as low-lifes for whom Tony finds appropriate executions. Then there is the young Michelle Pfeiffer as the bad-tempered prize Tony craves, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as the sister he can share with no one.

TUCKER: DE PALMA GAVE PFEIFFER ONE OF THE MOST SPECTACULAR ENTRANCES
Meanwhile, sparked by Mann's latest, Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker (author of Scarface Nation) is offering an "EW University" gangster movie class all week long. In today's lesson, Tucker discusses the role of women in gangster movies, with a focus on Pfeiffer's Elvira:

SCARFACE MONTAGE TAKES IT TO THE LIMIT
Warren J. Cantrell's top ten list of movie montages, posted at Scene Stealers, is not specifically related to gangster films, but it does feature Scarface up there in the top five. Here is what Cantrell says about the montage:

Money. That’s not only a description of this montage, but the image that kicks it off and sweet-Christ, is there a lot of it! After solidifying his position as the go-to man for cocaine imports and distribution in Miami, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) goes to work maximizing his power base in the vacuum left in Frank’s absence. Wisely moving through what looks to be as many as six months of expansion and growth, director Brian De Palma gives the audience not-so-subtle hints regarding the extent of Tony’s ascension. We watch the spread of the protagonist’s influence through multiple business ventures, a chic wedding (that showcases a fucking domesticated tiger), lines of men marching into a bank with duffel bags full of money, and a good-for-nothing junkie wife that is in it for the gravy. The montage has been parodied before, and for good reason, as it is absolutely dripping with cheese (the background track rivals Bloodsport’s in sheer awesome-per-square inch), yet isn’t that the point? The film is a salute to the possibilities of life in the United States for any person with balls solid enough to take what is there. In Tony Montana, America found a willing taker, a victim of this country’s lop-sided promise who, while tough as nails and quite willing, did not understand the basic necessity of freedom: restraint. A microcosm of the thematic elements of the film at large, the montage represents both Tony at the peak of his power, yet in the midst of what will ultimately ruin him. It is Tony’s blind embrace of the American dream (and the idea that one must keep reaching for more) that will doom him, for he doesn’t understand (nor will he ever) that balls might be what it takes to get to the top, but that brains are needed to stay there. The song here is “Take It To the Limit,” and for good reason, as the montage demonstrates Tony doing what he does best, mainly chewing through everything and everyone to get higher up the social ladder (the tragic inevitability, of course, is that once to the top, to keep trying to climb will mean a terrible fall).

Clarkson had a small part in Brian De Palma's 1983 film Scarface. The actress had answered a reader's question about her role in Scarface in a June 2002 posting on her now defunct website, livingdollproductions.com:

Yes, indeed you did see me in the Babylon club scenes in Scarface. The director, Brian De Palma hired 12 Screen Actors Guild members, ladies, whom he put under contract for a couple of weeks. This was to avoid any union problems or restrictions while he was in creative mode. It was an interesting set to be on, though I wish I'd had more to do. I was taller than most of the "gang" members and therefore, was basically window dressing. Regardless, it was a great opportunity to watch artists of [Al] Pacino and De Palma's caliber work. Mr. Pacino was always in character, even when in his trailer which was just down from mine. I often overheard him speaking to his dresser in his Tony Montana accent. He's an extremely intense and focused actor who is a joy to be around because of his commitment. Steven Bauer was dreamy, Michelle Pffeifer, nervous and De Palma drank lots of coffee and smoked lots of cigarettes. I think they were all under a lot of pressure form Universal. We worked hard, right up 'till Christmas Eve. I got on a plane the next morning to join my family in Hawaii. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

In Saviano's book, he spends some time delving into the relationship between the Comorra and Hollywood, finding that it is not Hollywood reflecting reality, but the other way around. Here is an excerpt in which Saviano walks through the former mansion of one Mafia boss who had given his architect a copy of De Palma's Scarface because he wanted Tony Montana's villa, "exactly as it was in the movie," a villa, Saviano states, that everyone calls Hollywood. However, after being caught by the police, the boss had everything removed because, as Saviano writes, "If he couldn't use it, it shouldn't exist. Either his or no one's"...

Saviano goes on in this chapter to relate how the movies are studied by generations of bosses and criminals who want to carve out an image for themselves. The author provides examples of these from several films, including The Godfather ("Before the film came out," writes Saviano, "no one in the Sicilian or Campania criminal organizations had ever used the term padrino"), Il camorrista ("The film's sound track has become a sort of Camorra theme song, whistled when a neighborhood capo walks by, or just to make a shopkeeper nervous"), Good Fellas (Saviano imagines one scene flashing in a would-be gangster's mind as he meets his death), The Crow (one man wore clothes reminiscent of Brandon Lee's in that film), Pulp Fiction (Camorra killers have started holding their guns crooked, the way they do in Tarantino's film, which makes them horrible shooters for which they compensate by leaving a bloody mess everywhere), Kill Bill (bodyguards for female bosses dress like Uma Thurman's character), Nikita (one woman's nickname), and even Taxi Driver (two young bullies would start fights with a look, and then repeat after Robert De Niro's famous lines from that film: "You talkin' to me?").

Those two bullies are the characters in the film mentioned at the top of this post. In early January, it was announced that Martin Scorsese would lend his name in support of IFC Films' U.S. release of Garrone's Gomorrah, which opened in select U.S. theaters this past weekend. "Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah is a tough, forceful look at the Neapolitan underworld," Scorsese told the Hollywood Reporter. "I admire the bluntness of this picture and the devotion of Garrone and his actors in their pursuit of a terrible truth. Gomorrah is despairing, but it's also enlightening and, because of its frankness, strangely heartening." Garrone responded, "I have been waiting for some time for the chance to thank Martin Scorsese publicly for the courage and generosity he has shown in laying his support on the line for Gomorrah. I can't forget how deeply touched I was seeing him arrive for the presentation of the film; of all directors, he is one of the most important in my development as a filmmaker. I am therefore extremely proud that the film has found such a prestigious adoptive father, and I will certainly cherish this memory for all time."

GOMORRAH REVIEWS
What follows are links to several reviews of Garrone's film, with selected excerpts:

Anthony Lane at the New Yorker

Armond White at the New York Press

Chuck Williamson at Out 1 Film Journal

R. Kurt Osenlund at Your Movie Buddy

Gomorrah redefines the mob flick because it shows a criminal association not as it might be, but as it is. Still, Garrone isn't above giving a nod to his genre predecessors, namely Brian De Palma and his immortal Pacino vehicle, Scarface. The brief opening sequence has a tacky neon opulence reminiscent of the cult classic – even the title logo goes from red to “Vice City” pink – and, later, the delinquent duo play with empty pistols in an empty warehouse and pretend to be Tony Montana. What would Tony say if he saw Gomorrah? Fuhgeddaboutit? No way. Not this merciless movie. It sticks with you for days.

Christy Lemire at Associated Press

Steve Erickson at Gay City News

Greg Oguss at LA Snark

The Scarface references aren’t arguing the case that violent entertainment begets violent children or the truism about contemporary gangsters taking their cues from movie gangsters. Instead, they merely make an effective contrast between De Palma’s romantic vision and a milieu without any charismatic anti-heroes or blaze-of-glory deaths, where loyalties are never taken seriously enough to be betrayed. Even the few functionaries who walk away from the corrupt empire by the story’s end lack nobility, with their paths determined principally by cowardice and naiveté. Despite being well-versed in the bloody justice doled out by the mafia, the film’s myopic characters have little understanding of how completely the illegal and legal businesses of the Camorra shape their existence. Gomorrah’s end-titles offer a tally of official statistics to illustrate the Camorra’s social costs, suggesting that, by certain measures, this is the most criminally violent place on the planet. But the film offers no scenes of anti-mafia police efforts and the collective struggle required to change the region’s way of life is beyond the imagination.

J. Hoberman at the Village Voice

Martin Scorsese may be presenting Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, but this corrosive, slapdash, grimly exciting exposé of organized crime in and around Naples comes on like Mean Streets cubed. Detailing daily life inside a criminal state, it's a new sort of gangster film for America to ponder...

In a vacant lot outside the fortress walls, two skinny teenagers play at being the antihero of Brian De Palma's Scarface. That's the fantasy; robbing African crack dealers is the reality, after which the two aspiring gangsters dance in scurvy triumph on some gray-sand beach. Their dreams come true when they stumble upon a cache of weapons, including AK-47s and a bazooka. Meanwhile, the Camorra expands into legitimate businesses, from garbage disposal to haute couture.

Garrone skips from one Camorra scam to another, all plots climaxing amid inexplicable internecine warfare in a more or less simultaneous reckoning. Gomorrah's episodic, mosaic structure is in some ways comparable to Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, but Garrone is not so much interested in diagramming a process as mapping a specific terrain. Despite its vivid characterizations, the movie stays on the surface—or, rather, it offers a sort of neorealist reportage. (Occasionally, the sober frenzy indulges in the sort of grotesque humor Garrone employed in his 2002 black comedy The Embalmer, wherein the Camorra enlists a professional taxidermist to stitch a shipment of drugs into a corpse.) The undistinguished visual style is predicated on a jittery wide-screen SteadiCam. There's a sense that Garrone's bobbing and weaving camera is just hanging with the homies—a strategy akin to Saviano's in his first-person book.

Saviano devotes an entire chapter to detailing the often-comic Camorrista fascination with Hollywood gangster flicks—mainly De Palma's Scarface, but also The Godfather, GoodFellas, and Pulp Fiction. "It's not the movie world that scans the criminal world for the most interesting behavior," he writes. "The exact opposite is true." Garrone has taken this to heart. Characterized as it is by a total absence of antiheroic glamour, his unsentimentally tough and unrelentingly squalid movie is unlikely to inspire much real-world imitation.

STONE RESPECTS DE PALMA FOR CHOOSING HIS OWN APPROACH
Oliver Stone was interviewed by Tucker for Scarface Nation. We all know that Stone was at odds with De Palma for slowing down Stone's fast-paced narrative and excising dialogue scenes in favor of elaborate camera shots and long takes. Stone tells Tucker that had he been directing the film himself, he would have made it more "realistic and fast-paced, because it was more like, let's get to know this world. [But] Brian chose another approach, and I respect him for that."

In Tucker's book, Stone discusses some of the real life inspirations for his Scarface screenplay, and how De Palma added a oft-"excessive" operatic framework over the material that took liberty with logic. Stone is quoted as saying that certain things about De Palma's edits were sticking in his craw. "To me," Stone told Tucker, "what was being sacrificed was narrative sense and atmosphere."

OPERATIC FRAMEWORK, BUT LOGIC IS "REALLY LOOPY"
Stone elaborates on some of the issues he brought up in the memo he sent to producer Martin Bregman and Pacino in this excerpt from Tucker's book:

Stone's irksome memo addressed what he felt were "questions of logic. The film has a realistic base onto which was put an operatic framework. Which is okay-- it made the movie what it is, but for operatic purposes you don't throw out logic, and certain things were sticking in my craw. I think Brian had strayed--" Stone pauses here, looking for the right words before simply sighing and saying, "Sometimes his plot points are ridiculous. It's as if there's nobody keeping rational logic there. He's done certain things in other of his films too that are really loopy"-- Stone pauses to laugh almost affectionately-- "really loopy."

"A HONG KONG ACTION FILM BEFORE ITS TIME"
"I'll give you an example," Stone continues in Tucker's book...

So despite Stone's misgivings, Tucker told Michael Sragow at the Baltimore Sun that Stone is a big enough man to say, "I have to hand it to Brian; he knew what he was doing. He captured something that was in the air." Part of what De Palma captured in the ending of Scarface may have been inspired by King Kong, with Tony Montana acting as the old-fashioned monster, defiantly fending off attackers from below as he sits on top of the world (which for the original King Kong would have been the Empire State Building). Indeed, it would seem as though De Palma could have read the script and, either consciously or subconsciously, amped up the threat to Tony Montana as an echo of the ending of the 1933 classic. The climax of King Kong is quite obviously referenced at the end of De Palma's 1962 short Wotan's Wake, so it is definitely a film on De Palma's radar.

In fact, in a 1997 Journal Of Film And Video article titled "At Work In The Genre Laboratory: Brian De Palma's Scarface," Tricia Welsch suggested that De Palma's film alludes to both Frankenstein and King Kong. For Welsch, this "postmodern hybrid" of the gangster film was problematic, as it alluded to the Cuban immigrant as a "monster." Welsch further felt that De Palma's reputation added an element of the slasher film to the mix, but it is also interesting to note that Stone himself began directing by making horror films like Seizure and The Hand (both made before writing Scarface), so Scarface as a horror/gangster hybrid seems valid from the ground up. In any case, De Palma spoke in those days of wanting to break out of genres and of creating new ones, and his free-wheeling sensibilities were perhaps most aptly described by critic Jake Horsley, when he referred to De Palma as a "pinball wizard."

A COUPLE MORE LINKS
Tucker was also interviewed recently by Craig D. Lindsey at the Philadelphia Weekly. Elsewhere, Tucker and Bauer are two of several people quoted in a Scarface 25th anniversary article posted by Lee Hernández three days ago at the New York Daily News.

I think their interpretation of its acceptance in pop culture is that it somehow tarnishes the movie and they can’t understand that it’s what keeps it alive. I think they really ought to loosen up and embrace it. They should own their Scarface.

Tucker echoes Pauline Kael's estimation of Orson Wells' Citizen Kane when he calls Scarface a "shallow masterpiece," but he differentiates the two films in his book's introduction. He writes:

No, what Scarface is, in a sense, is something bigger, more outsized than [whatever it is that makes Citizen Kane "great"]. [Scarface] is a great and shallow masterpiece of pop, a work of diverse mongrel artistry. It's all surface, but, boy, what Brian De Palma, Oliver Stone, and Al Pacino applied to that surface. It glows, it glistens, it retains its sheen of power, glory, and shimmeringly decadent rot a quarter century after its release. It remains a tremendously exciting and dismaying piece of moviemaking, unique in the careers of every one of its various creators.

As a film and as a pop culture phenomenon, Tucker appreciates Scarface very much, and his book takes a non-linear approach in exploring both the origins of De Palma's film and the unpredictable journey it has taken since it was released 25 years ago this month. Delving into the "disreputable and sneaky" way the film has and continues to seep into American culture (via posters, T-shirts, mansions, parties, etc.) Tucker concludes that "Scarface belongs to no single author, and therefore we are all free to be the auteurs of Tony Montana's saga, and his life everlasting."

TUCKER SAYS GOODNIGHT TO THE BAD GUY
I will write more about this book later this week, delving into some of Stone's thoughts on the film via a new interview for Tucker's book. At the end of Scarface Nation, Tucker acknowledges that he consulted the "superb" De Palma a la Mod, as well as Bill Fentum's "invaluable" (and unfortunately now defunct) website, briandepalma.net. Tucker was also able to get a few quotes from De Palma when he ran into the director during the 2005 Toronto Film Festival. Tucker closes his book with the following about that instance:

At that time, [De Palma] said he would sit down for a more extensive interview. He subsequently declined all my follow-up requests. I will refrain from using a Scarfacian imprecation regarding this behavior, and simply say goodnight to the bad guy.

I should also mention that throughout the book, Tucker displays a fondness for several of De Palma's films, especially The Fury, which he describes in loving detail as a way to delve into some of De Palma's stylistic themes. In this section, Tucker states, "The climax of The Fury is, in its way, just as bloody and tragic and 'operatic' as that of Scarface." However, as I loved Tucker's book overall, it pains me to say that he should have gone back and looked at The Fury more closely, because he gets certain significant facts about who was killing who and what actress was playing the one getting killed, etc., wrong. This leads Tucker to suggest inadvertantly that Gillian purposely killed a woman in a savage manner prior to meeting Robin, which simply is not true. But don't let that dissuade you from checking out this unique and otherwise well-informed book.

Also check out Michael Sragow's interview with Tucker.

Zach Kosnitzky, formerly of the defunct CBS reality show Kid Nation, is a new fan. He's only 10. "I love Scarface!" joked Zach, dressed in a black zoot suit with an old school gangster fedora. "Just please don't tell my parents I'm here."