As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, when Night Train Murdersderailed I switched to 1983’s remake of Scarface, starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeifer. I remember watching this film when it first arrived on home video but it did not leave a lasting impression. Sometime a film doesn’t work because the film itself is flawed and sometime I am not in the right frame of mind to receive it. The first time I watched The Godfatherit sailed right on past without much impact and perhaps that would be the case with Scarface.

Nope.

This film is a mess. At nearly three hours it is epic is length but not so epic in its scope. The story follows young Tony Montana from his arrival in Miami from Cuba as part of a massive influx of Cuban refugees to his ascension as a drug kingdom and his downfall. Certainly there is a lot there to explore, perhaps more than could be justly covered in a single film. In addition to his climb and fall in the illicit drug trade the story also covers his relationship with his mother and his sister, the latter played my Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in a terrible frizzed out perm, his best friend Manny, and that strange inexplicable love affair/marriage to his boss’s woman, Elvira.

The movie has a strange penetration into pop culture, particularly the line ‘Say hello to my little friend,’ but without any meaningful theme. Released in 1983 it so perfectly capture the style of movie making from that period it could be easily mistaken for a parody of early 80’s movies. The color pallet tends towards garish pastels, the score is electronic with a heavy use of synthesizers, and while the use of songs does not quite reach made for MTV video levels they very much feature prominently in the soundscape. (Though it should be noted that the director’s heavy finger on the camera’s zoom button is more an artifact of the 70’s.)

Scarfacebecame a flashpoint for controversy before its release when the MPAA rating board threatened to give the film an ‘X’ rating for its depiction of graphic violence even after three rounds of edits to attempt to earn an ‘R’. The director, Brian De Palma, famously fought the rating, restored the film to his original vision and then won an appeal with the MPAA at large to secure the desired ‘R’ rating. Today the film’s graphic violence is scarcely noteworthy and in my opinion so over the top as to remove all reality from it. Particularly the scene where, as a number of men fire fully automatic weapons at Tony, one of the associates approaches stealthy from behindTony with a shot gun. First off, during a hail of gunfire there is no need for anything even remotely like stealth and second Hollywood never seems to think about rounds down range. Apparently bullets intended for Tony are incapable of injuring anything but Tony.

With so many better organized crime movies to watch, such as The Godfatheror Good Fellas, there is no need waste any time with the remake of Scarface. (Thought it still has better structure than Night Train Murders.)