Stream On! Scarface-off: Hawks & Muni vs. De Palma & Pacino
Howard Hawks’ landmark 1932 gangster movie ‘Scarface’ and Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake.
Director Brian De Palma became popular making pastiches. Or homages? Fan art? Remakes? of movies from his favorite directors. 1981’s Blow Out was De Palma’s treatment of Antonioni’s Blowup. In 1983 he tackled an idiosyncratic treatment of Howard Hawks’ landmark 1932 gangster movie Scarface: The Shame of a Nation.
SCARFACE: THE SHAME OF A NATION
/Streaming /Amazon /🍅98% 🍿86% /Trailer /1932 /Pre-Code
Paul Muni threw himself into each role, changing his voice, his body and even his face. His habit of hiding behind make-up for each role won him the nickname “The New Lon Chaney,” but it also got on the nerves of his boss at Warner Brothers, Jack Warner, who complained, “Why are we paying him so much money when we can't even find him?”
In Howard Hawks’ dark film noir aka Scarface Muni plays Tony Camonte, little better than a thug, who violently rises up through the criminal underground of Chicago. At first glance, he’s not impressive, just goofy—and feral. But he gradually rises in the estimation of his boss’s mistress Poppy (Karen Morley, who is subtly excellent). She is highly skeptical when they meet and Tony decides to court her in return.
—In 1920’s Chicago, Tony is working as a bodyguard for crime lord “Big” Louis Costillo. Siding with Costillo's disgruntled lieutenant Johnny Lovo, Tony guns down his boss. Lovo takes over Costillo's territory in the South Side and has Tony and his associates, the dim-witted Angelo and the handsome playboy Guino “Little Boy” Rinaldo, supervise a lucrative bootlegging operation selling illegal beer to all of the bars there and forcing out rivals.
Tony urges Lovo to start moving in on the North Side, where the bootlegging is controlled by the Irish gangster O'Hara; Lovo refuses, ordering Tony to leave the North Side alone. Tony ignores these orders and starts taking out O'Hara's men while expanding his rackets to the North. Before long, Lovo is only the nominal boss while Tony becomes increasingly notorious and powerful, attracting the attention of both other gangsters and the police.—
I wasn’t on board at first with Muni; Tony seemed merely a beast, but as the film wore on, they both, Muni and Tony, rose in my estimation, as in Poppy’s. (This was my first Paul Muni experience.) French Director François Truffaut has pointed out that director Hawks intentionally shot Muni as though he were a wild animal in order to capture his character’s sheer brutality. At any rate Muni’s overall performance helped my appreciation of this great film.
/Streaming /Amazon /🍅79% 🍿93% /Trailer /1983 /R
I don’t know what I have against Brian De Palma’s films—as I said, I always find them entertaining. It might be a lack of subtlety. I noticed this especially, a kind of comic-book feeling, in Blowout, which I watched while writing about Antonioni’s Blow Up.
De Palma’s Scarface certainly hit with the public; catch-phrases and memes from it are still popular. It’s a shiny object that stood out in a decade of shiny objects. And much of that is due to the over-the-top performance of Al Pacino (Heat, The Godfather) as Tony “Scarface” Montana, a Cuban criminal who has landed in Miami in the Mariel boatlift (explained in the opening credits). Tony’s own backstory—such as he frames it—is told by Tony himself in his Immigration and Naturalization Service interview, in an intimidating but surprisingly candid self-assessment.
Pacino’s audacious decision to play a Paul Muni role worked out well, plus, he gets to scream.
The characters of the earlier film are represented with different names but similar fates. Notably, Tony’s love interest, here Elvira, who is initially repulsed by Tony, is played fetchingly by Michelle Pfeiffer. The plot is very close: Tony rises violently through the underground from hitman to mob boss; he loves his boss’s girl; his grasp exceeds his reach; stuff happens.
De Palma’s films can also be a tad stylized for my tastes, but when one is on, it doesn’t bother me: they are entertaining. Still, I like De Palma’s Scarface less than Hawks’ original—but it’s close.
Sources include Wikipedia (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License); TCM.com; Brittanica
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.