On the whole, films directed by Brian DePalma are always lacking something -
always intellectually weak and extremely stylistic - almost as if they were pictures
without words; hollow paintings. The notorious director crosses genre after genre,
exploring drama ('Casualties of War'), suspense ('Dressed to Kill'), horror ('Carrie') and
even good old summer action pictures like 'Mission : Impossible'.  In 'Scarface', the only
film of his films that worked perfectly, he unleased a violent, bloody terror of a gangster
film that doesn’t just paint its anti-hero as sad - but makes him a classic tragedy in the
tradition of “Richard III”.

 Watching the film, recently, on DVD in it’s widescreen composition, we still see
the blurred vision of DePalma’s Miami - a sunny place that always looks overcast. He
paints a character who has it all and is never satisfied, can never rest and never seems
happy. The color process, a sub-standard version of Technicolor, works in so many ways
in this film. While the parallels to the visual picture go hand in hand with the story of
Tony Montana (Al Pacino), the whole film seems to rotate around the idea that no matter
what these people do, their worlds always have a black cloud looming just overhead.
Even when Tony sees the blimp that tells him “The World is Yours” - the color, his arm
in a cast, his hand grasping a gun, a tired and wasted look on his face and the
moment-defining Georgio Moroder score (that sounds like a car crash of Ennio
Morricone’s spaghetti western scores and disco music) - they all define a man who can
possess the world, but will always, as a mortal, be confined to the classic law “power
corrupts”.

 Oliver Stone’s screenplay, thought brutal then (before he unleased 'Natural Born
Killers' on us) is a pointed and searing thing, like his Oscar-winning script for 'Midnight
Express'. Of the same workmanship and in the same vein of hopelessness (with a different
spin : Tony ventures into hopelessness with the expectation of buying his way out of it;
Billy Hayes has hopelessness stamped on him and must race against his own sanity to rub
it off of him) - 'Scarface' is a brilliant gangster film, unlike the best of them because it
never glorifies Tony. It may have the wonderful feel of a man on his way to the top, but
the the bigger they come, the harder they fall (literally - down a flight of steps into a
fountain). There’s a great scene in the film that Stone has written in which Tony’s wife
Elvira (Michelle Pfieffer) tells him what a lousy father he’d make and how no matter
how rich and how powerful his is, he’ll never be a winner - only a “loser”. Tony’s
rebuttal includes a terrific speech about how rich people are weak and need someone like
him to point their finger at, to make them more secure about themselves. Tony is a
classic film character unlike any other screen gangster - or villain for that matter.