A.V Club : Brian De Palma

It took the guts of a gambler for De Palma and screenwriter Oliver Stone to remake Howard Hawks’ 1932 classic Scarface, the gold standard of stylish gangster movies and the source of much of their iconography. But De Palma’s spectacularly garish 1983 epic raises the stakes even higher. Even if you love the remake, its closing dedication to Hawks and screenwriter Ben Hecht’s original is bound to elicit a guffaw, given how thoroughly De Palma debases its source material. Though critics largely dismissed Scarface at the time as gratuitously violent trash, the movie has enjoyed a long second life as a touchstone of hip-hop culture. While the rise and fall of nouveau riche Cuban drug lord Tony Montana (Al Pacino) could be considered a monument to gangsta excess—the trappings of Montana’s cocaine palace would make the titans of Wall Street blush—the film (and hip-hop’s relationship to it) is more complicated than it appears on the surface. Pacino’s larger-than-life antihero makes his name as a pugnacious entrepreneur who abides by street codes of honor and loyalty, even as he breaks every law in the book. He loses his way the moment he stops adhering to those codes. There are lessons to be drawn from this brazen, vulgar, gleefully excessive moral fable, which De Palma renders in stark opposition to the stately, burnished classism of The Godfather.



After Scarface, De Palma suffered back-to-back flops with Body Double and Wise Guys, then took on a purely commercial assignment: a David Mamet-penned big-screen adaptation of G-man Eliot Ness’ memoir The Untouchables. Costner plays Ness as a righteous hero who needs to be taught how to be rough, with the help of a grizzled old Chicago cop played by Sean Connery (who won an Oscar for the role), while De Palma’s old pal Robert De Niro chews the scenery (and looks oddly like James Gandolfini) as mob boss Al Capone. The Untouchables was as straightforward a movie as De Palma had ever delivered, and was, justifiably, an enormous hit. But it’s not completely impersonal. De Palma may have kept his hands off Mamet’s script, but he provides plenty of his own visual snap, including a magnificently staged showdown around a railroad bridge on the Canadian border, and a train station shootout that quotes Sergei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence from The Battleship Potemkin.

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