"I ought to be pickin' gold from the streets."

Rating: 8/10 (13 August 2012)

Let 1983's "Scarface" be always remembered as the film that first introduced the 'F' word firing machine gun. The first thing I did in researching the picture was to see how many times it was used, and sure enough, the word in it's various forms is used two hundred twenty six times. So if the picture runs just under three hours, that's more than one per minute. Anyone know if that's a record?
Well I'd read and heard a lot about this film over the years but tonight was my first time to see it. I really wasn't all that impressed. As far as gangster films go, this didn't engage me like the "The Godfather", the best of them all, or even as much as a couple other personal favorites, "Goodfellas" and "Miller's Crossing". More than one reviewer here described it as over the top for it's excessive violence and Pacino's maniacal characterization of Cuban refugee turned drug lord Tony Montana, and I would concur. I guess it was OK if you go in for that kind of stuff, but I was looking for more of a compelling story to go with the mayhem and drug deals.
At first I wasn't convinced that this was a remake of the 1932 movie of the same name starring Paul Muni. On reflection though, the key elements are there, including a more violent reaction by Montana to his sister Gina's (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) sexuality and the kind of men she attracted. Personally, I go for the classics in black and white so I found the original more interesting with a run time of just about half of this film. Early in the picture when he's being grilled by the authorities, Tony admits being a Bogart and Cagney fan, but I thought it would have been much cooler for the writers to insert the names of Muni and George Raft instead, both of whom were in the original "Scarface".