1,001 Films: "Scarface" (1983)

Anyone criticising Brian de Palma's coke-bloated, blood-spattered 1983 remix of Scarface for the manner in which it inflates Howard Hawks' original obviously wasn't paying attention to the hammy excesses of Paul Muni first time around, or the fact that a surfeit of tacky bling has long been essential get-up for any wannabe hood. (How many gangsta rappers have quoted de Palma's film, without apparent irony, in the years since?) Oliver Stone's screenplay reimagines Tony Montana (played here by Al Pacino) as a Cuban immigrant climbing the criminal ladder in 1980s Miami, his cocky insubordination getting it all: money, guns, girls (Michelle Pfeiffer, one year on from Grease 2, makes every one of her scenes count as a bored moll from Baltimore), power, paranoid delusions following hard on the stacked heels of his delusions of grandeur, and an inevitable demise, not in a hail of bullets, but a blizzard of cocaine.

A more legitimate criticism is that de Palma's conspicuous consumption, deliberate or otherwise, hasn't entirely dated well: some of the locations (the neon-lit Babylon nightclub, the shagpile carpets of kingpin Robert Loggia's crib) and the accoutrements (Pacino's blinding white suits, Giorgio Moroder's synth score) now come over as a terrible hangover from the disco era, and the general tackiness isn't helped by the insistence on pushing Tony's already close-knit relationship with his sister (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), the embodiment of those things he wants but cannot have, into intimated incest. As illustrated elsewhere by possibly the cheesiest of all 1980s movie montages (set to Paul Engemann's "Push It To The Limit"), it is, like many of de Palma's films from this point onwards, a faintly silly, insincere entertainment: pastiche, rather than meant. (Stone would have to direct Wall Street himself to make his points about the decade's greed stick in any way.) This director's technical brio keeps every scene well within the realms of garish watchability, even if what we eventually end up watching is no more than the advent of Shouty Al ("You fuckin' buy a gun!"), playing out a simplified version of the Corleone character arc, only with the volume cranked up as loud as some of the decor and leisurewear.

Scarface is available on DVD through Universal.