Pacino at his swaggering best

Press, 23 April 1984, Page 10

Pacino at his swaggering best

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hans petrovic

SCARFACE Directed by Brian De Palma Screenplay by Oliver Stone

Even before Al Pacino reached the top of the underworld in the “Godfather” movies, his ambition obviously had always been to follow in the footsteps of Hollywood’s little Big Guys, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. In almost all of his cinema acting career, he has been associated with the underworld in one way or another — “The Godfather” and the small-time hood in “Dog Day Afternoon,” or the unorthodox cops in “Serpico” and “Cruising.” In “Scarface” (Cinerama), his Cuban refugee character explains how he learnt his good English: “My father take me to the movies. I watch the guys like Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney. I learn how to speak from those guys. I like those guys.”

It also strikes me as a remarkable coincidence that Al Pacino’s name is almost an anagram of Al Capone, that real-life, small big-time gangster. This time, in “Scarface,” Pacino fully achieves his dream with a fine, swaggering performance, although the film proves too heavy and long for easy digestion. Paul Muni appeared in the original “Scarface: The Shame of the Nation” in

1932 as Tony Camonte, a character based on Al Capone, a cold, ruthless gangster immigrant from Sicily whose only redeeming feature was his love for his sister.

(George Raft also appeared and has been associated with his gangster role ever since.) Directed by Howard Hawks and co-written by Ben Hecht, the 1932 movie was considered a dark, exhilaratingly violent work that was almost too potent for its time.

Nearly all this also applies to the latest version of “Scarface.” Times have changed, however, and now the criminal, named Tony Montana, comes from Cuba in the 1980 wave of refugees to the United States, although he still takes a fatal interest in his sister. The new version can also be described as dark and violent but certainly not exhilarating, and I doubt

that it will be remembered as much in spite of Brian De Palma’s attempts to present an operatically grandiose comment on crime and cocaine.

Montana is a ruthless, fearless young punk who arrives in Miami with his friend, Manolo (Steven Bauer), and sets out to fulfil his American dream:

“I want what’s coming to me— the world and everything in it,” he says. “In this country, you first get the money, then the power and then the women.”

Montana begins working for another drug dealer (Robert Loggia), and then steadily works his way up the hierarchy of crime. He soon outgrows the boss and eliminates him, while developing contacts with the narcotics suppliers in Bolivia, earning him between $lO million and $l5 million a month. He makes his former boss’s girl (Michele Pfeiffer) his wife and moves into a grand mansion with a tiger in the back.

Montana, however, soon forgets the two basic rules taught him by his boss: “First, don’t underestimate the other guy’s greed; second, don’t get high on your own supply.” His bored wife has a penchant for cocaine which he soon develops also, leading to a complete degeneration of his character and misjudgments on an everincreasing scale.

The inevitable reckoning also comes on a grand scale, with his head buried in a mountain of coke, and his sister and an army of killers gunning for him in that huge, black and red mansion, complete with pools for the bodies to fall into.

The violence is done in a style that would make Sam Peckinpah (“The Getaway” on TV last Friday) proud, right from the machine gun and chainsaw fight near the start to the final storming by the army of the night. Montana was an unfeel-

ing, vicious animal throughout, and it only comes as a relief when he gets his just deserts — putting an end to this over-long (almost three hours) saga of greed, gore and profanity (the most popular expletive is used at least 180 times). Throughout all this, Pacino has managed to put together an amazingly powerful performance, while De Palma has set this character in a splendidly conceived world of his own.

A world, however, to which no-one else would care to get too close. .