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Domino is
a "disarmingly
straight-forward"
work that "pushes
us to reexamine our
relationship to images
and their consumption,
not only ethically
but metaphysically"
-Collin Brinkman

De Palma on Domino
"It was not recut.
I was not involved
in the ADR, the
musical recording
sessions, the final
mix or the color
timing of the
final print."

Listen to
Donaggio's full score
for Domino online

De Palma/Lehman
rapport at work
in Snakes

De Palma/Lehman
next novel is Terry

De Palma developing
Catch And Kill,
"a horror movie
based on real things
that have happened
in the news"

Supercut video
of De Palma's films
edited by Carl Rodrigue

Washington Post
review of Keesey book

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Exclusive Passion
Interviews:

Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario

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AV Club Review
of Dumas book

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Sunday, March 17, 2024
THE 'UNDENIABLE PROPULSION' OF 'SCARFACE'
AWARDS DAILY'S DAVID PHILLIPS MOVES PAST THE LEGENDS TO LOOK AT DE PALMA'S FILM ITSELF
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/scarface2745.jpg

"Scarface, Brian De Palma’s nearly three-hour reach for epic-level greatness, is seldom talked about as an actual film anymore," states Awards Daily's David Phillips at the start of his "Reframing" essay about Scarface. "The movie," Phillips continues, "(and particularly Al Pacino’s no-holds barred performance as gangster Tony Montana) have drifted so far into iconography that the quality of the film itself has become secondary to its legend. And it’s one hell of a legend at this point."

Here's more:

As a film, Scarface has largely one pounding note to play—one filled with extraordinary levels of violence and drug usage (including Pacino going facedown in a huge pile of coke, and taking more bullets to the chest and still standing than any human ever). And it plays that note relentlessly for the entirety of its extended running time. There is a boldness in the film’s extreme approach that can be both exhilarating (De Palma’s camera movement is exquisite) and exhausting. Scarface is all just so much much.

And yet there is an undeniable propulsion in the film, a ferocity that exists throughout that cannot be easily dismissed. It really says something that Pacino, who played the legendary film gangster Michael Corleone in two of the greatest films ever made (Godfather I & II), might have eclipsed that seminal character with Tony Montana in the eyes of crime-film lovers. As his reluctant paramour and later recalcitrant wife, Pfeiffer gives one of the great ice-queen performances in the history of cinema (I swear, her bangs and bob were cut with steel). Written by Oliver Stone, the film is chock-full of quotable lines and in all technical aspects, Scarface looks and sounds remarkable.

The question I suppose is to what end? What are we to take away from all of the sturm und drang displayed in Scarface? There’s a great scene late in the film, when an over-coked and over served Montana humiliates Elvira, makes a spectacle of himself in front a full house of a Michelin-starred restaurant, and turns to the milky-white patrons, dresses them down for their own largesse, and says, “Say good night to the bad guy.” In that moment, De Palma’s film asks some interesting questions about capitalism and who benefits from it. I wish the film would have delved deeper into that theme as opposed to settling for being a “wonderful portrait of a real louse.”

That being said, I cannot disagree with Roger Ebert’s assessment, even though it seems that many who have seen (and will see) Scarface will find what I would consider a strange and abiding love for that louse. Regardless of whether one is repulsed or invigorated by the film (or, maybe like me, both), what Scarface eventually reveals to us is less about what happens to the people on screen, and more about how its massive cult following has responded to it. Depending on your perspective, I suppose the film can be seen as “just a movie,” or a reflection of our large-scale societal affection for those who are unapologetically bad. De Palma’s Scarface prefaced the era of the TV anti-hero (see The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Ozark, and so on) but followed on the heels of films like The Hustler and Bonnie and Clyde—movies about the disreputable and our attachment to them.

Scarface wasn’t so much new or groundbreaking, as much as it was the most pitched variation on that theme. It’s hard to imagine films like Natural Born Killers or Fight Club without De Palma’s still troubling “classic” gangster epic. A distinction that one may have trouble wrestling with depending on how they feel about those aforementioned films.

One thing is clear though: The audience for “the bad guy” is in no way ready to “say good night.” Not on film. Not in real life.


Posted by Geoff at 10:49 PM CDT
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post
THE 'UNDENIABLE PROPULSION' OF 'SCARFACE'
AWARDS DAILY'S DAVID PHILLIPS MOVES PAST THE LEGENDS TO LOOK AT DE PALMA'S FILM ITSELF
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/scarface2745.jpg

"Scarface, Brian De Palma’s nearly three-hour reach for epic-level greatness, is seldom talked about as an actual film anymore," states Awards Daily's David Phillips at the start of his "Reframing" essay about Scarface. "The movie," Phillips continues, "(and particularly Al Pacino’s no-holds barred performance as gangster Tony Montana) have drifted so far into iconography that the quality of the film itself has become secondary to its legend. And it’s one hell of a legend at this point."

Here's more:

As a film, Scarface has largely one pounding note to play—one filled with extraordinary levels of violence and drug usage (including Pacino going facedown in a huge pile of coke, and taking more bullets to the chest and still standing than any human ever). And it plays that note relentlessly for the entirety of its extended running time. There is a boldness in the film’s extreme approach that can be both exhilarating (De Palma’s camera movement is exquisite) and exhausting. Scarface is all just so much much.

And yet there is an undeniable propulsion in the film, a ferocity that exists throughout that cannot be easily dismissed. It really says something that Pacino, who played the legendary film gangster Michael Corleone in two of the greatest films ever made (Godfather I & II), might have eclipsed that seminal character with Tony Montana in the eyes of crime-film lovers. As his reluctant paramour and later recalcitrant wife, Pfeiffer gives one of the great ice-queen performances in the history of cinema (I swear, her bangs and bob were cut with steel). Written by Oliver Stone, the film is chock-full of quotable lines and in all technical aspects, Scarface looks and sounds remarkable.

The question I suppose is to what end? What are we to take away from all of the sturm und drang displayed in Scarface? There’s a great scene late in the film, when an over-coked and over served Montana humiliates Elvira, makes a spectacle of himself in front a full house of a Michelin-starred restaurant, and turns to the milky-white patrons, dresses them down for their own largesse, and says, “Say good night to the bad guy.” In that moment, De Palma’s film asks some interesting questions about capitalism and who benefits from it. I wish the film would have delved deeper into that theme as opposed to settling for being a “wonderful portrait of a real louse.”

That being said, I cannot disagree with Roger Ebert’s assessment, even though it seems that many who have seen (and will see) Scarface will find what I would consider a strange and abiding love for that louse. Regardless of whether one is repulsed or invigorated by the film (or, maybe like me, both), what Scarface eventually reveals to us is less about what happens to the people on screen, and more about how its massive cult following has responded to it. Depending on your perspective, I suppose the film can be seen as “just a movie,” or a reflection of our large-scale societal affection for those who are unapologetically bad. De Palma’s Scarface prefaced the era of the TV anti-hero (see The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Ozark, and so on) but followed on the heels of films like The Hustler and Bonnie and Clyde—movies about the disreputable and our attachment to them.

Scarface wasn’t so much new or groundbreaking, as much as it was the most pitched variation on that theme. It’s hard to imagine films like Natural Born Killers or Fight Club without De Palma’s still troubling “classic” gangster epic. A distinction that one may have trouble wrestling with depending on how they feel about those aforementioned films.

One thing is clear though: The audience for “the bad guy” is in no way ready to “say good night.” Not on film. Not in real life.


Posted by Geoff at 10:44 PM CDT
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Tuesday, March 5, 2024
'A FAIRY PRINCESS STORY WRAPPED IN PINK, PURPLE, AND CYAN'
CROOKED MARQUEE'S CIARA MOLONEY SAYS SCARFACE IS FEMININE DEEP IN ITS BONES
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/ginamirrors55.jpg

"Scarface is For Girls" reads the headline of a Ciara Moloney article posted today at Crooked Marquee. "Last summer," Moloney begins, "at the peak of the Barbenheimer phenomenon, it seemed like cinematic gender essentialism – the kind that made a Ghostbusters reboot a lightning rod for controversy the guts of a decade ago – had finally died off. Barbie and Oppenheimer were released on the same day, and what was set up as a versus between the “boy movie” and the “girl movie” quickly became a both/and. There were no movies for this gender or that, just a couple of great films that we all wanted to see. I saw them back-to-back. Loads of people saw them back-to-back, and tons more watched both films at some point in their long runs on the big screen. The movies were back, and this time, quadrants could be damned.

"Then awards season came along and, as usual, crushed all my hopes and dreams.

"Barbie lost out on nominations for Best Director and Best Actress, for Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie respectively. A backlash strong enough to rope in Hillary Clinton followed. Much of the backlash included accusations of sexism on the Academy’s part, which, given their historical and ongoing aversion to female directors, cinematographers and visual effects artists, makes sense. But the backlash framed Barbie as female in some deeper, more intrinsic sense than, say, Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet and with a cast led by Sandra Hüller, both of whom were nominated. Barbie was not just by women, but for women.

"'Did too many people (particularly women) enjoy Barbie for it to be considered ‘important’ enough for academy voters?' Mary McNamara questioned in the LA Times, '… Was it just too pink?'"

From this set-up, Moloney dives into what, on the immediate surface, seems like a completely absurd notion: that Brian De Palma's Scarface is "the girliest, pinkest movie in the world." The tone of the piece is playful, and yet... one can't help but sense there might be at least a tiny bit of truth in what she is saying:

I tried to think of other girlish, pink movies that didn’t get their due accolades on release. Dirty Dancing doesn’t count, obviously, since that’s a class conflict sports movie in the vein of Rocky. Every man I’ve ever met loves When Harry Met Sally. But of course, the girliest, pinkest movie in the world was robbed of even an Oscar nomination: Brian De Palma’s Scarface.

Since its release in 1983, consistent efforts from film critics, rappers, and dorm poster salesmen to assert the macho masculinity of Scarface have failed to erase this simple truth: Scarface is a fairy princess story wrapped in pink, purple, and cyan. Both its score and soundtrack are exuberantly feminine dance-pop from euro disco pioneer Giorgio Moroder. Can you imagine any of the many, many hip hop songs inspired by Scarface rubbing shoulders with Debbie Harry, Amy Holland or Elizabeth Daily on the film’s actual soundtrack? I cannot, and that includes the ones that literally sample music from Scarface.

The film’s girliness is exemplified in the “Push It To The Limit” montage, which pulses to a beat much closer to a makeover montage than a rising-to-power one. It’s set to a relentlessly upbeat bit of synth that would make any Death to Disco advocate throw up. And it’s not creating an ironic contrast between that music and the images: it doesn’t just sound like a makeover montage, it looks and feels like one, too – with images of Tony’s sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) trying on outfits at the store, not to mention the opening of her beauty salon (in a perfectly pink palette, of course) and Tony’s wedding to Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer), featuring his new pet tiger.

Tony’s banker calls his wife Elvia “the princess,” but he’s got it backwards. Elvira is a Prince Charming: an American-born WASP, gorgeous in her slinky backless dresses, she is a conduit to and symbol of power and privilege, a cipher onto which men can project the American Dream. Tony Montana is the princess – not the kind that exists in reality, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but that kind that exists in fairy tales. Pauline Kael complained that Tony seemed “to get to the top by one quick coup,” with no sense of his rise there. But it’s not that it’s a typical gangster story with parts missing. Tony is Cinderella. He’s Evita. He’s Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. He’s plucked from the gutter to the palace in one fell swoop.

And with that one fell swoop, he puts together his own Barbie Dreamhouse of material consumption, complete with a ginormous bubble bath and a pink neon sign in the foyer: “The World Is Yours.” He changes outfits with the regularity of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, an assortment of suits in endless colours. And when he has it all, he stares into the middle distance, alone, in a pink-lit nightclub, like a sad rich girl in a Sofia Coppola movie.

Scarface is feminine deep in its bones, even more so than Barbie – De Palma would never have allowed a Matchbox Twenty song to intrude. (Maybe “Smooth” by Santana feat. Rob Thomas.) If we insist on gendering movies, and doing so on the basis of aesthetics, we must face up to this simple fact: Scarface is for girls.



Posted by Geoff at 10:57 PM CST
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Monday, March 4, 2024
GLENN KENNY 'SCARFACE' BOOK COMING MAY 2024
KENNY DISCUSSES ON FIRST EPISODE OF "THE MISFITS" HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE PODCAST
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/glennkennyscarface1.jpg

"Well, what happened is, I had written this book about Goodfellas," Glenn Kenny begins on the debut episode of The Misfits, a new podcast from Hollywood Elsewhere. To make a long story short, following his terrific and well-received book, Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, Kenny tried to write a book about the film Sleepless In Seattle. After that project fell apart, Kenny and his publisher decided to do a book about Scarface. The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface will be published May 7th. Here are some general notes about the book from the podcast, which is definitely worth listening to:

- I got the cooperation of Brian De Palma, which was very important

- I got Oliver Stone on board

- I got a lot of people on board

- And we kind of did the same drill as the Goodfellas book: we have a making of, we have a scene-by-scene breakdown

- Scarface has an even bigger cultural footprint than Goodfellas (which itself is pretty well-known and widely-quoted)

- And I hope to get De Palma involved in some promotional projects. We’re doing a launch on May 14th at The Mysterious Bookshop, in downtown Manhattan, my favorite book store. We’re doing other events, as well. And I hope Brian will come along for some. I think Steven Bauer will certainly be involved. I had the best time with Steven Bauer, the guy who plays Manny. He gave me the most stuff.

- I got Michelle Pfeiffer, which is not an easy get. But I did get her. And she was great. She was lovely. She’s so interesting, because, you know, she’s very frank about her experience. She’s proud of the work that she did on the film, but she said every minute on the set was torture. And it wasn’t because she was being mistreated or disrespected by anybody, it’s just her level of confidence was so low, she was always afraid that she was screwing up. She had no kind of feeling for the value of what she was doing, and she was miserable.

- [William McCuddy cuts in: “But that works for the film – she looks frightened all the time.”

- Yeah. Well, the one thing, the one direction that Brian always gave her – and she talks about Brian being very good and very sympathetic – she says, but Brian, after every take, the one thing he would ask her was, “Did you smile?” Because she wasn’t supposed to smile. You know, there was a notion that she would try to warm the character up just a little bit, and Brian said, “I appreciate you want to do this, I know you have the ability to do it, but for the purpose of the role, you can’t do it.” Although there is one scene where she does it, and I won’t say what it is. But when you read the book, we go into it, and it’s an improvised scene. It’s a scene between her and Pacino where she does laugh.

- Bauer’s origins

- Pacino’s accent and how Bauer influenced it

- Charles Durning and Dennis Franz dubbed lines in opening interrogation

- De-myth of Spielberg directing a shot

- Pacino decided to write his own book, and so did not participate in Kenny's book

- Bregman/Pacino fallout over Born On The Fourth of July

- Jeff Wells sneaking onto Scarface set at mansion

- McCuddy fascinated by New York portion of film within this Miami story

- Entertaining chapter about R-rating due to testimony of a film critic


Posted by Geoff at 7:06 PM CST
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Wednesday, January 10, 2024
EL PAÍS - 'SCARFACE' AS A CULT OBJECT, 40 YEARS LATER
STONE CONCEIVED AS "A GREAT CARRIBEAN EPIC, EXUBERANT, GLAMOROUS, EROTIC, FULL OF ENERGY, EXTRAVAGANCE & COLOR"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/1stnyshowing.jpg

EL PAÍS' Miquel Echarri looks at Brian De Palma's Scarface as "the film that took 40 years to become a classic" -
[Oliver] Stone spent several weeks in the Latin neighborhoods of Miami, meeting with police officers and criminals, and the atmosphere drove him back into the old habit of snorting cocaine constantly. From there he moved with his wife to Paris, where he wrote the script “in one sitting and completely sober.” By then, he already conceived the film as “a great Caribbean epic, exuberant, glamorous, erotic, full of energy, extravagance and color.”

When the man who was going to direct the film, Sidney Lumet, read the nearly 300 pages Stone had written, he resorted to the always useful argument of “creative differences” to dodge the bullet. Bregman tried to convince him, reminding him how well they had worked together in previous projects in which Pacino had also been involved, such as Serpico or Dog Day Afternoon, but it was no use. Lumet did not want to compromise his prestige by taking part in such nonsense, although he was gracious enough not to express his opinion in public.

Thus, Bregman turned to Brian De Palma, who was having trouble closing some financing deals after the box office failure of one of his most personal films, Blow Out (1981), and was willing, for once, to take on a commissioned film. At this point Robert De Niro had already rejected the role of Tony Montana. Glenn Close, Kim Basinger, Brooke Shields, Sharon Stone and a half-dozen other actresses had been considered for Elvira, the gangster’s lover, and Bregman had resigned himself to offering the role to an “icy and inexperienced” 24-year-old Michelle Pfeiffer.

Filming was a 24-week marathon between November 1982 and May 1983 that began in Los Angeles to then continue in San Diego and Santa Barbara, with a brief and almost clandestine trip to Miami, where some scenes were shot in spite of the fact that the city that had refused to host the film, starting with one of the most famous: the brutal dismemberment of Ángel, Montana’s first partner.

In March, Pacino suffered severe burns on his left hand when he accidentally grabbed the barrel of a gun that had just been fired. While he recovered in the hospital, De Palma took the opportunity to shoot a series of action scenes that did not require his presence. In one of them, the premature explosion of a bomb caused serious injuries to two specialists. However, the most prominent incident, which a Variety article presented as a supreme example of the level of frivolity and delirium that Hollywood productions were reaching at the time, was the damage that Pacino’s nasal passages suffered after inhaling the high quantities of baby laxative and powdered milk that served as cocaine during the filming of the almost continuous narcotic scenes.

Stone contributed, perhaps unintentionally, to the film’s dark legend. As he told the specialized website Creative Screenwriting, he felt trapped on the set, annoyed by the exasperating slowness caused by the constant interruptions, the neurotic perfectionism of a Brian De Palma that was obsessed with countless trivial details and the puzzling insecurity of Pacino, who insisted on repeating takes over and over. When the final scene was being filmed, that orgy of violence that De Palma conceived as an homage to Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), Steven Spielberg paid a courtesy visit to the Santa Barbara set and insisted on lending a hand. De Palma commissioned him to direct the peculiar shot in which the killers first break into Tony Montana’s mansion.

In the end, the film survived various accidents and difficulties and arrived at the theaters on time. It had a notable performance in its first week, although it only grossed half as much as its great rival at the box office, Sudden Impact, the sequel to Dirty Harry directed by Clint Eastwood, another ultraviolent production reviled by the critics.

Scarface finished the season grossing a respectable but ultimately disappointing $45 million in the United States and $20 million worldwide. Profitability would come later, in a way that was unusual at the time: a quick release on VHS and Betamax in the summer of 1984 that made it the most rented film of the year, and the first to exceed 100,000 copies sold in home video format. Critic Gary Arnold described it as a guilty pleasure: you wouldn’t go see it at the daytime screening of a Times Square movie theater, but you are willing to rent it on the sly and enjoy it by yourself in the privacy of your home.

Today, no one seems to have much problem with it. Hollywood Insider considers it one of the ten best gangster films in history, on Quora they place it among the great classics of all time and its role as a great countercultural reference is barely questioned anymore. In Star Tribune, Gary Thompson remembers that some of the Oscar contenders in 1983 were Yentl, The Big Chill and Silkwood, three featherweights, and that the winner, Terms of Endearment, was not much better. The highest-grossing films of the year were Return of the Jedi and Octopussy. To that batch of harmless, almost immediately obsolete movies, Thompson opposes one of the films of the early 1980s that have aged best, Scarface, with its chainsaw slaughter, its giant mounds of cocaine and Pacino’s lost gaze as he insults left and right with a bizarre Cuban accent. It is difficult, for anyone who has seen it, to disagree with such a verdict.


Posted by Geoff at 11:41 PM CST
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Monday, December 11, 2023
L.A.TACO, 40 YEARS LATER, FINDING SCARFACE FILMING LOCATIONS
EXEC PRODUCER LOUIS STROLLER CREDITS FERDINANDO SCARFIOTTI - "HE WAS VERY INVENTIVE"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/scarfacemother055.jpg

At L.A. Taco, Jared Cowan writes about searching for and photographing the Los Angeles filming locations for Brian De Palma's Scarface, forty years later (see the article in full for Cowan's photographs and comparison frames from the film) -
The film’s producers had intended to shoot almost all of Scarface in Miami.

“I was the first guy [from the production] in Miami, and I was supposed to set up the entire movie there,” says Scarface executive producer Louis Stroller.

But some Miami columnists and politicians were highly critical of the storyline, and the controversies surrounding the filming of Scarface garnered numerous headlines before production started.

“Miami was and still is very well-to-do, and there were a lot of bankers and lawyers, and they didn’t want to point to Miami as a place where all bad Cubans went,” Stroller tells L.A. TACO. “So they put pressure on and pressure on until, finally, the studio called and said, ‘No, we’re not going to make the movie in Florida at all. If we’re going to make this movie, it’s going to come back to L.A.’”

At the end of the day, community leaders were likely feeling the loss of the economic impact that comes from a major studio production. Constituents were also applying the pressure, as a number of local Cuban actors that were supportive of the film showed up at town hall meetings focused on the production.

Eventually, leaders of Miami’s Cuban-American community welcomed back the filmmakers, though they were still not thrilled about the main character being a Mariel criminal.

Stroller says they were permitted to return because the production wasn’t going to shoot any scenes in Miami that were detrimental to the area.

The producers also agreed to include a disclaimer at the end of the film stating that Scarface did not represent the Cuban-American community as a whole.

Over ten days, with bodyguards in tow, De Palma shot mostly exteriors that best captured Miami’s modern, Art Deco, and tropical aesthetics.

Aside from the film’s pressure-cooker car-bomb-gone-awry sequence filmed in New York, and the exterior of Tony’s Miami compound and Alejandro Sosa’s Bolivian estate, which were both shot in Santa Barbara, much of the nearly three-hour film was shot between practical L.A. locations and sets built on-stage at Universal Studios.

Stroller gives a lot of the credit to Scarface’s visual consultant, Ferdinando Scarfiotti, for capturing the look of Miami in L.A.

“He went back to L.A. and scouted all the places and he came up with some wonderful locations,” says Stroller. “He was very inventive.”

Unfortunately, 40 years later there aren’t many folks from the production who can comment with first-hand knowledge on the film’s locations, even Stroller.

“It was a few days ago,” he quips.

De Palma could not be reached for comment for this article.

Scarfiotti, producer Martin Bregman, art director Edward Richardson, cinematographer John Alonzo, and location manager Frank Pierson, who may have had some insight on the film’s locations, have since passed away.

One location manager who worked on the Florida locales declined to comment on the move from Miami to L.A.

Co-producer Peter Saphier told us he wasn’t close enough to the actual filming - he mainly dealt with Bregman, Stroller, and Universal executives - to say why and how the L.A. locations were chosen.

With all that in mind, L.A. TACO took a photographic look at a number of the L.A. spots from one of the most polarizing yet hugely influential gangster pictures ever made.

L.A. Taco

Posted by Geoff at 11:51 PM CST
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Sunday, December 10, 2023
MOTHER IN 'SCARFACE' ECHOES MOTHER IN 'CARRIE'
FRAMED IN AN OPEN DOORWAY
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Posted by Geoff at 12:28 PM CST
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Saturday, December 9, 2023
'SCARFACE' RELEASED IN THEATERS 40 YEARS AGO TODAY
ROGER EBERT: "THE MOVIE OBSERVES HIM WITH ALMOST ANTHROPOLOGICAL DETACHMENT"
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From Roger Ebert's 1983 review in The Chicago Sun-Times:
The interesting thing is the way Tony Montana stays in the memory, taking on the dimensions of a real, tortured person. Most thrillers use interchangeable characters, and most gangster movies are more interested in action than personality, but "Scarface" is one of those special movies, like "The Godfather," that is willing to take a flawed, evil man and allow him to be human. Maybe it's no coincidence that Montana is played by Al Pacino, the same actor who played Michael Corleone.

Montana is a punk from Cuba. The opening scene of the movie informs us that when Cuban refugees were allowed to come to America in 1981, Fidel Castro had his own little private revenge -- and cleaned out his prison cells, sending us criminals along with his weary and huddled masses. We see Montana trying to bluff his way through an interrogation by US federal agents, and that's basically what he'll do for the whole movie: bluff. He has no real character and no real courage, although for a short time cocaine gives him the illusion of both.

"Scarface" takes its title from the 1932 Howard Hawks movie, which was inspired by the career of Al Capone. That Hawks film was the most violent gangster film of its time, and this 1983 film by Brian DePalma also has been surrounded by a controversy over its violence, but in both movies the violence grows out of the lives of the characters; it isn't used for thrills but for a sort of harrowing lesson about self-destruction. Both movies are about the rise and fall of a gangster, and they both make much of the hero's neurotic obsession with his sister, but the 1983 "Scarface" isn't a remake, and it owes more to "The Godfather" than to Hawks.

That's because it sees its criminal so clearly as a person with a popular product to sell, working in a society that wants to buy. In the old days it was booze. For the Corleones, it was gambling and prostitution. Now it's cocaine. The message for the dealer remains the same: Only a fool gets hooked on his own goods. For Tony Montana, the choices seem simple at first. He can work hard, be honest and make a humble wage as a dishwasher. Or he can work for organized crime, make himself more vicious than his competitors and get the big cars, the beautiful women and the boot-licking attention from nightclub doormen. He doesn't wash many dishes.

As Montana works his way into the south Florida illegal drug trade, the movie observes him with almost anthropological detachment. This isn't one of those movies where the characters all come with labels attached ("boss," "lieutenant," "hit man") and behave exactly as we expect them to. DePalma and his writer, Oliver Stone, have created a gallery of specific individuals, and one of the fascinations of the movie is that we aren't watching crime-movie clichés, we're watching people who are criminals.

Al Pacino does not make Montana into a sympathetic character, but he does make him into somebody we can identify with, in a horrified way, if only because of his perfectly understandable motivations. Wouldn't we all like to be rich and powerful, have desirable sex partners, live in a mansion, be catered to by faithful servants -- and hardly have to work? Well, yeah, now that you mention it. Dealing drugs offers the possibility of such a lifestyle, but it also involves selling your soul.

Montana gets it all and he loses it all. That's predictable. What is original about this movie is the attention it gives to how little Montana enjoys it while he has it. Two scenes are truly pathetic; in one of them, he sits in a nightclub with his blond mistress and his faithful sidekick, and he's so wiped out on cocaine that the only emotions he can really feel are impatience and boredom. In the other one, trying for a desperate transfusion of energy, he plunges his face into a pile of cocaine and inhales as if he were a drowning man.

"Scarface" understands this criminal personality, with its links between laziness and ruthlessness, grandiosity and low self-esteem, pipe dreams and a chronic inability to be happy. It's also an exciting crime picture, in the tradition of the 1932 movie. And, like the "Godfather" movies, it's a gallery of wonderful supporting performances: Steven Bauer as a sidekick, Michelle Pfeiffer as a woman whose need for drugs leads her from one wrong lover to another, Robert Loggia as a mob boss who isn't quite vicious enough, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, as Pacino's kid sister who wants the right to self-destruct in the manner of her own choosing.

These are the people Tony Montana deserves in his life, and "Scarface" is a wonderful portrait of a real louse.



Posted by Geoff at 12:17 PM CST
Updated: Saturday, December 9, 2023 7:39 PM CST
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Friday, December 8, 2023
NEW BOOK BY NAT SEGALOFF DIGS DEEP INTO 'SCARFACE'
WITH FOREWARD BY STEVEN BAUER
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Nat Segaloff gets into all the details surrounding Scarface, from the origins of the original Howard Hawks film, towards especially the 1983 version that Brian De Palma directed (the inside jacket indicates the book is timed for the latter film's 40th anniversary). There's a forward by Steven Bauer, and our friend Laurent Vachaud is quoted on the book's back cover:
"Not content with tracing the origins, production, reception, and legacy of Howard Hawks's film and Brian De Palma's remake with an incredible wealth of detail, Nat Segaloff takes digressions into the history of the main players, Prohibition, the cocaine trade, and many other subjects, always in a concise and entertaining manner. For all these reasons, Say Hello to My Little Friend is the ultimate all-in-one guide on Scarface that will teach you everything and more."
-Laurent Vachaud, co-author of De Palma on De Palma

 

"Al Pacino fans will devour this book. It identifies Scarface as the driving force behind Pacino's evolution as a star. The analysis of his Tony and Paul Muni's Tony in the first Scarface is fascinating, as are all of Segaloff's stories about the Mob and how it infiltrated Hollywood during the film industry's golden age."
-Robert Hofler, author of The Way They Were and The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson



Posted by Geoff at 11:11 PM CST
Updated: Friday, December 8, 2023 11:13 PM CST
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Thursday, December 7, 2023
DAVID AYER TALKS ABOUT HIS REJECTED SCARFACE SCRIPT
"ONE OF THE BEST SCRIPTS I'VE EVER WRITTEN WAS MY SCARFACE DRAFT"
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Total Film's GamesRadar quotes David Ayers from the latest issue of the print magazine:
Suicide Squad director David Ayer reflects on his unmade Scarface reboot script, and admits it was one of his best.

"One of the best scripts I’ve ever written was my Scarface draft," he says in the new 2024 preview issue of Total Film, which hits shelves this week. "It gets passed around in Hollywood, underground. It’s funny when people talk about the project. 'Is it the Ayer script?' 'No, it’s somebody else.' 'Oh, OK.'"

Ayer was attached to the reboot of the classic Brian De Palma film which starred Al Pacino as Tony Montana before he parted ways with Universal on the project in 2017. Speaking to TF in our new issue, the director also addresses the misconception that the script was turned down because it was too violent.

"It wasn’t too violent. Violence – I can cover it. If someone gets shot, I can photograph it where a head explodes and have a hard R, and it’s not going to alienate people. That’s easy. That’s filmmaker 101. I created this rich, soulful journey through the drug trade, and kind of what it is. The studio just wanted something more… fun."

He continues: "Scarface is its biggest IP behind Jurassic Park. They want to capture as big of an audience as possible. I fucking love Universal. Amazing people. I had this really honest conversation about the movie they wish they had, and the movie that I wished to make. There’s a lot of daylight between us. It’s just easier to be like, 'Let’s park this.'"


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CST
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