Josef von Sternberg turned the story of Catherine the Great into what he himself called a "relentless excursion into style " the decor and the visual motifs became the stars, and Marlene Dietrich was used as a camera subject instead of as a person. Produced by Martin Bregman, for Universal.įor a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book State of the Art.ġ10 min, No rating, Black & White, Available on videocassette
Alonzo the designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti served as visual consultant the score is by Giorgio Moroder-it's reminiscent of his music for CAT PEOPLE. Murray Abraham as Omar, Steven Bauer as Manolo, Robert Loggia as Frank Lopez, Michelle Pfeiffer as Elvira, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Gina, Paul Shenar as Sosa, Harris Yulin as Bernstein, Arnaldo Santana as Ernie, Richard Belzer as the nightclub m.c., and some highly expendable scenes with Miriam Colon as Tony's poor-but-proud mother. This may be the only action picture that turns into an allegory of impotence. It's a druggy spectacle-manic yet exhausted, with De Palma entering into the derangement and trying to bring something larger than life out of Tony's debauchery.
The picture is peddling macho primitivism and at the same time making it absurd. But the scenes are so shapeless that we don't know at what point we're meant to laugh. Probably all this excess is intended to be satirical-snorting coke turns into a running gag. But when Tony gets everything he wants, he's a pig rooting around in money and cocaine, and, as things go wrong, he snorts more and more. For the first three-quarters of an hour, the film feels like the beginning of a new-style, post-GODFATHER gangster epic-hot and raw, like a spaghetti Western. The middle of the movie is missing we get the aftermaths but not the capers. Al Pacino's Tony Montana, a Cuban who scrambles to the top of the Miami drug world, is just starting to learn the ropes and then, sated with wealth and dope, he's moldy. Presented by Howard Hughes United Artists.ġ70 min, Rated R, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdiscĭirected by Brian De Palma from a script by Oliver Stone, this 2-hour-and-49-minute remake of the 1932 SCARFACE has the length of an epic but not the texture of an epic, and its dramatic arc is faulty. The title SCARFACE bore the subtitle SHAME OF THE NATION. The film was ready for release in 1930, but was held up for two years by censorship problems the scene in the publisher's office wasn't directed by Hawks-it was inserted to appease pressure groups. The cinematography is by Lee Garmes and L.W. It is certainly cinema." The story, based on a novel by Armitage Trail, is credited to Hecht, and the continuity and dialogue to Seton I. The camera follows the ball he's thrown as it knocks down all the pins except one that keeps spinning until it finally falls over, the exact symbol of Karloff himself, the last survivor of a rival gang that's been wiped out by Muni. He squats down to throw a ball in a game of ninepins and doesn't get up a rifle shot prostrates him. Here's Truffaut again: "The most striking scene in the movie is unquestionably Boris Karloff's death. Henry Gordon, Tully Marshall, Henry Armetta, and Purnell Pratt. Truffaut suggests that Hawks "deliberately directed Paul Muni to make him look like a monkey, his arms hanging loosely and slightly curved, his face caught in a perpetual grimace." The cast includes George Raft, Osgood Perkins, Karen Morley, Boris Karloff, Vince Barnett, Edwin Maxwell, C.
The film's violence has the crazy, helter-skelter feeling of actual gun battles, and Paul Muni, with a machine gun in his arms, is brutal and grotesque, in a primal, childlike, fixating way. The opening sequence is a beauty: the camera moves from a street lamp with stylized skyscrapers in the background and follows a milkman into a speakeasy, where we see the remnants of a gangland New Year's Eve party and finally pick up the shadow of Scarface, who kills the gangland leader. The writer, Ben Hecht, and the director, Howard Hawks, said that they wrote the story by treating the Capone family "as if they were the Borgias set down in Chicago." Overall, it's a terrific movie, even though the pacing doesn't always seem quite right. The gangster classic, with Paul Muni as the dangerous hood with the scar on his cheek, and dark, huge-eyed Ann Dvorak as his sister. 90 min, No rating, Black & White, Available on videocassette and laserdisc
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